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The Ghetto Cook Prologue:
Broccoli and Cheddar Soup
Introduction:
Welcome one and all to what will hopefully be an ongoing series where I will share my adventures in making various dishes. I love cooking, but because I'm so fucking poor (and a cheap-ass to boot), I tend improvise substitutes for ingredients when I cook. This (hopefully) series of blogs will feature a wide variety of dishes that can be made with extremely cheap ingredients.
Recently, my room mate offered me several bags of frozen vegetables that she was going to throw out, with two of the bags being broccoli. Since I happened to have some cheddar cheese on hand, and having never had proper cheddar and broccoli soup, I decided it was a good opportunity to try something new. This soup has the added advantage of not needing a high-powered gas stove so you can make it on the electric range.
The Ingredients:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/O4LtL.jpg)
the mise en place, or most of it minus milk and black pepper
Broccoli (cut into bite-sized pieces)
Cheddar Cheese
Chicken Broth (or make your own like I did)*
Flour
Butter**
Milk
Onion***
Salt
Pepper
NOTE If you can, prepare the cheese at least 2 hours beforehand by mincing or shredding it and leaving it out to warm up to room temperature. This lets the cheese melt better.
*Chicken breasts with skin and bone were on sale. De-skin and de-bone the breasts, throw away the skin but keep the bones for making stock. You also get some nice boneless chicken breasts.
**I used margarine, which is cheaper and presumably healthier
***Half of one, minced
The Process
This is my second time making this soup, so I had a general idea of what to do: create a cream sauce using butter, flour, and milk in one pot, prepare the chicken broth in another pot, cook the vegetables in one or the other pot, and bring everything together into one pot at the end before melting the cheese into the soup to finish the dish. It sounds sophisticated, but I'm really just winging the whole thing, using bits and pieces from several recipes I found online, since every recipe is calling for something different.
First, I filled a pot with about 3 cups of water, plopped the chicken in, and closed the lid. It takes a while for the water to come to a boil, so the broth is cooked in parallel with the sauce base.
To make the sauce base, first melt the butter (about 1-2 tablespoons) in the pot at low heat, and then slowly stir in an equal part of flour until you get something yellow and sandy, like this:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/pY4Oe.jpg)
Do not eat the yellow sand
It is important to do this at low heat so that you do not burn the flour. You know you're doing it wrong when the thing is turning brown. Stir for about 1-2 minutes. Then, start adding the milk in intervals and stirring until you get a creamy sauce with a nice sheen.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/QB5x3.jpg)
So I heard your mother likes a different kind of white sauce
This is known by the French as bechamel sauce, which is a basic sauce that can be used to make other sauces. It also looks pretty fucking impressive considering how easy it is to make. Once it has reached this stage, I added the onions so I can soften them while the sauce is cooking, which takes about 10 minutes. The onions provide a nice aroma and they combine exceptionally well with chicken broth and black pepper.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/X9PWS.jpg)
This looks totally different from the last picture. Dem white lumps be onionz.
At this point, I knew I fucked up on timing because the sauce was nearly done but the chicken stock wasn't even close to boiling. Bummer. So I dumped the broccoli into the sauce to cook it instead of my original plan of softening it up in the chicken stock. The broccoli will also need about 10 minutes to cook anyways.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Awq8r.jpg)
Almost done, minus cheese, minus chicken broth.
After a few more minutes of standing there and stirring the sauce pot, the chicken broth is finally ready:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/uPiYj.jpg)
This kind of looks like shit, but I did strain it before adding to the soup so it's all OK.
I added about 2-3 ladles (1.5 cups?) of chicken broth to the soup, then took it off the heat for a bit to lower the soup temperature. Optimally cheese should be melted at a low heat and only at the end of a dish. I added the diced cheese to the mixture and stirred until all the cheese was melted. The final product:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/AMK5P.jpg)
If cooking was on iccup I'd be a B- at least
The Result
[b]4 / 5[b/] - The sodium levels were a bit off (underestimated the saltiness of cheese) and I didn't control for thickness as well as I thought. However, the chicken broth definitely brought something special to the soup and the cheddar cheese taste definitely came through. Goes well with a piece of toast or something similar.
Things to Improve
1) Frozen broccoli sucks. That frozen shit just doesn't cut it, fresh is infinitely better.
2) Don't add too much milk to the bechamel sauce. The chicken broth will thin out the sauce and is much tastier.
3) Add less salt. You can always add more salt after the cheese is melted.
And there you have it folks, broccoli and cheddar that's doable for the piss-poor masses. Questions and comments welcome. Also, if you are a cook yourself and you know something that I did wrong or fucked up on, please share the knowledge so I can improve!
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To make it less salty
-Use Water instead of broth
-Less cheese, add more cream for similar effect
To make the broccoli better for your ghetto-ness because frozen usually ends up with a funny taste i would recommend you dice it up stalks or just straight up blend it.
Why are you adding flour?
Good guide though ^_^
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To my faithful (and only) reader:
-The broth wasn't store bought, I made it myself, so there wasn't much salt in it anyways. If it was store bought broth, I wouldn't have added any salt at all, since it plus the cheese would have been enough.
-I've considered blending as a variation, but for this time I wanted to try it out straight up. I imagine blending green broccoli with yellow cheese would make the soup a puke-green color, which would be interesting.
-The flour adds thickness to the soup without having to melt a tremendous amount of cheese into it. Plus, it is an integral ingredient in the base sauce.
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Wow, when I read your title, saw what you were making, and the ingredients you had on hand, I was expecting something truly horrific. Something along the lines of you simply blending all the broccoli and cheese together with water.
But instead that soup looks really impressive and I will probably steal your recipe because I love broccoli cheese soup.
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cooking is alchemy at its finest
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Nicely done. The butter and flour mixture is called a roux, and as you mentioned, used as a thickening agent for soups and sauces. Hard to really tell from the pictures, but it seems you may have put a little too much flour in it or not cooked it long enough. You could try cooking it down more at low heat until you get a nice light golden brown color and it gives off a nutty smell. It should be more of a smooth texture rather than a grainy one.
Margarine can be better for you than butter, but it mostly depends on the fat content. Look at the trans fat and saturated fat content and compare it to butter. Lower numbers are better. Personally, I just like the taste of butter over margarine.
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Funny how this ghetto soup would actually cost a lot in Finland (around 10 euros, the most expensive things being the cheese and chicken), if I bought the ingredients. Looks pretty tasty though. I'll be looking forward to more recipes.
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On August 05 2011 00:16 WooChop wrote:
Nicely done. The butter and flour mixture is called a roux, and as you mentioned, used as a thickening agent for soups and sauces. Hard to really tell from the pictures, but it seems you may have put a little too much flour in it or not cooked it long enough. You could try cooking it down more at low heat until you get a nice light golden brown color and it gives off a nutty smell. It should be more of a smooth texture rather than a grainy one.
Margarine can be better for you than butter, but it mostly depends on the fat content. Look at the trans fat and saturated fat content and compare it to butter. Lower numbers are better. Personally, I just like the taste of butter over margarine.
Points taken. From what I know though, you can either brown the roux or not brown it depending on the dish. Sauces that use white cheese should generally be white and not browned (although I did use cheddar in this instance).
I have no idea which is used for what purpose though, so if you can give me a quick rundown on the difference in taste/usage that would be great.
On August 05 2011 00:29 Sotamursu wrote:
Funny how this ghetto soup would actually cost a lot in Finland (around 10 euros, the most expensive things being the cheese and chicken), if I bought the ingredients. Looks pretty tasty though. I'll be looking forward to more recipes.
Chicken is the cheapest meat available in the United States. If you can get beef or pork cheaper, it is highly recommended you use those meats instead, as they are far more appropriate (beef especially). Cheese seems to be expensive everywhere. I got mine for $3/pound (0.45 kg), which is still quite pricey compared to other protein sources.
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On August 07 2011 11:34 Newbistic wrote:Show nested quote +On August 05 2011 00:16 WooChop wrote:
Nicely done. The butter and flour mixture is called a roux, and as you mentioned, used as a thickening agent for soups and sauces. Hard to really tell from the pictures, but it seems you may have put a little too much flour in it or not cooked it long enough. You could try cooking it down more at low heat until you get a nice light golden brown color and it gives off a nutty smell. It should be more of a smooth texture rather than a grainy one.
Margarine can be better for you than butter, but it mostly depends on the fat content. Look at the trans fat and saturated fat content and compare it to butter. Lower numbers are better. Personally, I just like the taste of butter over margarine. Points taken. From what I know though, you can either brown the roux or not brown it depending on the dish. Sauces that use white cheese should generally be white and not browned (although I did use cheddar in this instance). I have no idea which is used for what purpose though, so if you can give me a quick rundown on the difference in taste/usage that would be great.
True, for this purpose, you wouldn't want to brown it too much. I'm not the most knowledgeable about when to use each, so I usually end up using something that's in the middle of the spectrum in most of my stuff. For a bechamel sauce, a lighter roux would be appropriate. A light golden-brown roux has worked nicely for me in the past. For a hearty soup (in my works, a creamy mushroom soup), a darker roux gives such an amazing flavor. More than anything, I would say just keep experimenting and see how things turn out.
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EPT
