What would it take for a soup to be exciting?

Call it a stew and suddenly everyone will think it's an exciting and hearty meal.

Ok so there are obviously ways to make the soup itself exciting that other people are covering with their responses. However! I'd like to propose that we can also change the CONTEXT of the soup to make it a little more exciting. When I was a kid, my church would do soup potlucks every so often, and it kinda was exciting to be able to try a bunch of different soups, and privately confer about which ones were the best. In a similar vein, you could retool a chili cook-off to be a soup cook-off, and I think that would be a little more exciting, especially if you think old church ladies aren't the most exciting crowd...

First of all, thanks for sharing. Randall is a genius and this comic is as funny as always.

However soup is not mid and never has been; soup is actually goated. Ramen (actually good, authentic ramen) is goated. Pho is goated. Just a good basic tomato soup is goated. Etc, etc.

People eat soup all the time. People even go out to eat soup all the time on purpose! But when you just call it "soup", people don't (immediately) think of the "exciting" soups, they think of chicken noodle soup from a can. But people are willing to pay $20/bowl for some noodles in hot pork water if you call it ramen.

So to answer your question, you just need to call it ramen, pho, or chowder. There may be other exciting soups that I am not thinking of or don't know about, but in general, if a restaurant can survive by just selling soup, that type of soup is probably exciting enough.

Corn chowder that can support a spoon vertically and good bread.

I just want to start by showing off the result of flipping to the soup section of celebrity chef Nick DiGiovanni's debut 2023 cookbook "Knife Drop": https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/84jdc3d36j4.png

On the following page it continues to the next section on sandwiches.

I kinda agree, things are pretty boring for the vast majority of soups found at chain restaurants, in cans, and as sides for larger meals. There's a value to that sometimes.

When I feel ill for instance, I don't want to be socked in the face with multi-leveled smorgasbords of texture and flavor; I just need simple nourishment and hydration along with some thermal heat to clear sinuses.

For those wanting more though, here are a few things I've picked up from higher level restaurants and home cooks over the years.

• For thin, broth based soups make sure to include some form of gelatin or emulsifing/thickening agent. This is what gives certain soups a luxurious rich texture and can help bridge the gap between oil/fat and water which makes for a unctuous mouthfeel similar to pho or certain kinds of ramen. You can pull this off by making your own stock complete with bones and other animal bits (chicken feet are rich with collagen!) to render out natural gelatin or just use the method J. Kenji Lopez-alt talks about here. He also digs deep into the why along with the how, so give it a read.

• Be careful with dairy when making soup with sharp flavors. For soups and stews with acidic, sour, or spicy flavors be careful with how much dairy you add if listed in a recipe. The biggest example for me was "White Chicken Chili" which is more of a green color due to the amount of chiles but you wouldn't really know due to all the jack cheese. Texas' heat-forward chili is another victim, with its customary dollop of sour cream.
  Just taste things as you go and see if you might enjoy the pre-dairy result better. If you absolutely need that dash of white for plating appeal, try pureed white onions instead of cream.

• Don't just simmer, blend. In nearly every soup I or my family makes, the immersion blender makes an appearance. Just ladle out some of the soup with a good amount of the solids and blend it finely before reintroducing it back to the pot. It's an easy way to get creamy textures for soups containing starches like potatoes, beans, legumes, or lentils and just generally drives flavors past what you can achieve by simmering alone.

• Try and increase the number of textures. More new sensory experiences on the spoon helps stave off boredom. Asian fish-balls bring spingy textures, fried tofu can be fluffy, fried strips of wontons, fried onions, or tortillas can bring crunch. Adding blanched veggies later in the cooking process can preserve their snap. Think about how a soup's ingredients get used outside of soup and see if there are any textures or preparations you can hijack. You can get really crazy with this; I remember seeing someone make polenta/grits out of popped popcorn instead of the usual coarsely ground cornmeal.

There are a bunch more little things I could say but this is already approaching TED talk length.

I grew up addicted to beef barley vegetable soups and frankly damn near every time a restaurant offered soup.

Now I have an electric pressure cooker. Ho ho ho.

But, seriously, they're the best thing ever for easy soups!

My soups are mostly made of refrigerator Velcro: whatever is lying around that I need to use. Most combinations work with perhaps a few exceptions!

My soup base varies but it's often nutritional yeast. Easy peasy! Add salt and oil and it's "chicken". Add vegetables and beans and/or noodles and you have an amazing soup or stew.

Make it creamy with some puréed cashews mixed with water.

Always always always add an acid: lemon juice or white vinegar. Needed for balance.

Miso + soy sauce gives more depth.

Seriously, I could eat this stuff for almost every darn meal.

I find soup mood dependent. If I'm really in the mood for one, it'll always be exciting at the moment.

There are few soups out there that will always get me excited, but one of them is Suan Cai Yu. It's a Sichuanese soup of poached fish with pickled mustard greens. A truly wonderful blend of spicy, savory, sweet, and sour flavors that I could eat all day.

Miso is a wonderful canvas on which to build some exciting soups. Add some lion's mane mushrooms, or hand-picked chantrelles, or some duck breast, some home-made chili oil, maybe some prawns, or crispy tofu, or

Chicken Tortilla Soup is very exciting to me.

Soup is absolutely my favorite meal, but one I don't really eat much of in the summer. How to make it exciting? Not exactly sure, but I suspect most people think of soup something like Campbells, with a thin broth and few, tiny chunks of chicken or vegetable and not much else.

I'm not sure how you change that perception, other than make proper soups for people so they can understand what it is when it's a meal unto itself.

Perhaps the easiest might be to get someone to a Pho or Ramen joint so that they can see what it's like to have a good soup and then expand their horizons from there.

My favorite food is a soup named Penang Asam Laksa. Hard to describe the taste as it can vary by vendor but usually it's spicy, a bit sweet, sour, fishy, and has the crunch of fresh onions with mint on top.

Tong Sui is a type of sweet/dessert soup I was introduced to. I never thought of soup as a dessert but it can amazing, especially on a hot and humid day.

I grew up on a lot of soup and I love it as a medium as there's so much you can do and (for me at least) it usually heats up well the next day for another meal or two.

As of the first day of fall (the first day it feels like fall to me, not necessarily the first official day of fall), soup is exceptionally exciting. I make my own broth from chicken bones/skins/whatever is left over and pack it with root veggies and hearty herbs and it is so delicious. It'd be delicious now, too, but I don't have air conditioning and it is so hot and sweaty. Don't make me leave the stove on all day.

I'm afraid I don't have a real answer to your question. I'm a good cook in my home, but not compared to the internet, and while tomato soup with a sandwich was pretty delicious for lunch today, it was hardly exciting. I once made a peanut butter broccoli soup (in a book called The Enchanted Broccoli Forest) that had a kind of curry flavor that was indeed exciting, but I've had too much whiskey to analyze that in any way.

Sorry for the drunk-post, but I'm feeling a bit lonely, and I guess this post is the target for that!

Split pea soup changed my life and I no longer think soup is lame. We've made this recipe over rice, although she calls for grilled cheese. The first time I had it it was over mashed potatoes. Amazing.

for me, it's sour. If we're talking soup as in "start with water or stock, throw stuff in, and don't add starches to thicken it", I like anything that has a sour or tangy flavor. Borscht, hot and sour, tomato with no dairy, all of those are top tier.

If we lean more towards stews, my top faves are lentil and split pea, I guess I just like small round legumes lol.

I think soup is always exciting. In Portugal soup is a big deal. You can find some varieties in most restaurants, but there are also regional traditional soups and foreign soups are also consumed. A full portuguese meal (which people don't necessarily eat every day) starts with a soup as the first course, unless it's a hearty soup (of which there are several possibilities) which can be the main course. I grew up eating soup almost every day, and expect it to be delicious. If I'm served bad or bland soup, I will think less of the host! That's just not done outside a hospital!

Here's a portuguese website with soup recipes (the videos are in portuguese but you can google translate the recipes, I suppose). This is a popular website so even though not all of these recipes are traditionally portuguese, you would surely find these soups in many households.

I'm going to say something that probably no one knows, and even I didn't know until I emigrated. Portugal is the soup paradise. I thought it was standard (at least in European context) that eating soup frequently was the way to get your veggies. Then I discovered that in almost all places that soup is the main and not a side course!

Soup is integral to our diet. Soup usually is the first course in your meal. Maybe in Summer you can sometimes trade soup for salad (but our typical salad is always the same which I find it boring; lettuce, cucumber, tomato, salt, vinegar and olive oil), but, if there are younger kids at the table then you can bet it is 100% guaranteed to have soup on the table.

What I wanted to arrive is: try to search Portuguese soups on the internet, we have so many recipes so it is hard for me to say something useful.

Maybe just to provide examples with some photos, see here or here Even though we have much more across the multiple regions.

The famous ones that come out off the top of my head:

• Fish soup (from Algarve)
• Caldo Verde (from Minho)
• Pedra soup (from Ribatejo) - Ok, this one is basically a main course.
• Açorda (from Alentejo) - Ok, maybe another main course
• Tomato soup with poached eggs (from Alentejo)
• Canja de galinha - Basically, chicken soup. But outside PT, this soup is bland. In here, it is delicious. Not sure why is different.
• etc

But then we have so many other ones that I think it's hard to point to a certain region. Everyone does stuff just like carrot cream soup, vegetable cream soup, spinach soup, leeks soup, watercress soup, green beans soup, because they are faster. These soups can have the same base, and you simply switch the "topping" (spinach, green beans, etc).

A base could be something like potato (but to be honest, I have been skipping this because it is an "empty vegetable" and maybe something like chacoyte it is better and still gives that creamy texture; but even chacoyte is optional), aubergine, courgette, some carrots and pumpkin. So something like 1x Aubergine, 3/4x Potatos or 1x Chacoyte (optional), 5x Carrots, one bag of frozen chopped pumpkin (I think 500gr), 1/2x courgette (depending on size), 1/2x onions, salt and olive oil. After that is cooked, you blend it and add the topping afterwards and cook for a little bit longer.

Ah, and I use 3 litres of water. Don't be afraid to freeze the soup! The soup stays good in the pan and in the fridge maybe for 4 days, then later freeze!

Soup is always exciting to me if I've been outside all day when it's 10 below zero in the winter.
Good ingredients can make a big difference too, even a simple chicken noodle is amazing with fresh home made pasta.

Turn it into a nice curry laksa, put some chicken slices and noodles and fish balls and bean curd in there, and serve it up with a glass of fresh iced calamansi juice.

I love soup and will eat soup through out the year whether if it is cold or hot. For me, a good soup is all about the broth.

I grew up eating soups and grew regularly like kimchi jigae, or miyeok guk (korean seaweed soup). Many of my relatives will always insists there no meal without a soup.

What generally excites me is trying soup in new places or cuisines. When I travel, I usually eat soup to ease my stomach to the local cuisines and taste. When I went to Peru, I ordered mostly caldo de gallo and other soups in the region. It helped my stomach get more antiquated to the local microflora in the region.

An easy way to make a soup better is to add a finish, something as small as a teaspoon of olive oil drizzled on top looks appealing and enhances flavor.

Marketing.

The right name, the right "origin story", and it's to-die-for.

I make a thing I call "Shrek Soup" (half split-pea, half pureed spinach, soymilk, and a buttload of spices) ... it's good, works as a stand-alone meal.

But it's the name (coupled with the appearance) that sells it.

Being made of fruit