Soup is a nutritious and inexpensive meal to eat. Learn how you can make your own delicious and easy homemade soup that is inexpensive and rich with nutrients. Soup is an awesome meal for any time of the year, even when it’s warm.
Homemade soup is a powerhouse, both nutritionally and for your tummy and budget. It’s one of the easiest, complete, meals to digest and there’s a reason that Grandma’s Chicken Soup was so good for recovery after a cold, or the flu. Part of it is the nutritional value, and the other part is the delicious herbs and spices that were included too!
You can make your own awesome and amazing homemade soup with ingredients you already have on hand. Homemade soup doesn’t have to follow a strict recipe, you can vary and change the formula to match what you have on hand, or the type of meat you have available. It’s very flexible, and a great way to use leftovers and small amounts of vegetables, root vegetables, squashes, or bones and meats.
Benefits of eating homemade soup
Convenience is a huge benefit of making and eating homemade soups. There’s also the greater bio-availability of the nutrients from the bones, meats, vegetables and other soup components.You can enjoy more varied flavor and variety than with canned, store purchased soups. You also have control over the herbs and salt content, while avoiding preservatives and thickening additives.
Healing Soup Qualities
There are many healing qualities in natural, homemade soup. They come from the herbs, the vegetables, and the bone broth or stock that is used as the soup’s base. Depending on your health goals, you can tweak your soup recipe to fit, and bring health to yourself and your family.
Bone Broth Is Loaded With Natural Gelatin
Natural gelatin is one of the premier health compounds in homemade soups. It is easy to digest, a rich source of protein, and soothing to the digestive system. Making bone broth is the bases for a great, nutritious, soup. The difference between bone broth and stock is simple. Bone broth contains bones and sometimes onions, garlic, or ingredients that are also found in stocks. Stock contains vegetable skins, and other vegetable and herb parts that are normally not served in food, like parsley stalks, celery leaves, or carrot and onion skins.
A chicken bone broth, or chicken feet broth, is the best base for homemade chicken noodle soup. A stock base is awesome for vegetable soup, lentil soup, or 3 bean soup. Beef bone broth makes awesome french onion soup, and is a great base for a noodle bowl with soup noodles too.
Gelatin Helps Heal Digestion
Gelatin is soothing to the digestive system, and can even help heal digestive issues and irritations. Due to the ease of digestibility, accessibility of proteins, and soothing qualities, it’s a great base for healing soup. Pair with anti-inflammatory herbs, and easily digested vegetables for best results.
If your goal is healing digestion, avoid heavy fiber foods in the soup, like cabbage, kale, or cheese. These can be irritating to some digestive systems. If they are soothing to YOU, you can add them, though.
Gelatin Helps With Inflammation
Gelatin is a non-inflammatory compound. Pair gelatin rich broth with anti-inflammatory herbs and lots of vegetables for awesome soups that won’t increase inflammation. I like using lots of herbs in my soups, including basil, thyme, sage, rosemary, and even a bit of cayenne.
Bone broth benefits include being easy to digest, a great use of otherwise waste bones, and a great source of gelatin and a source of some minerals too. Use bone broth as the bases for other soups and stews, as needed, or drink as is.
Bone broth also helps restore gut lining, restore good bacteria to the digestive tract, and can even help reduce food sensitivities related to the gut.
Reducing Food Waste
Soup is a great way to reduce food waste, especially if you’re aiming for a zero food waste year. Leftovers can make interesting soups. Left over baked butternut squash? Add some bone broth, a bit of curry spices, and some coconut milk for a healthy and quick butternut squash soup. Top with pumpkin seeds, or sunflower seeds for more fats and protein.
Use a slow-cooker, or a crockpot, to assemble leftover soup as you’re putting the leftovers away. Let it run overnight, and you’ll have fresh soup for lunch. Just make sure to puree things like pumpkin soup, and to remove bones if using a chicken carcass or something similar.
If you make bone broth or vegetable broth, or stock, in advance you can keep it in the freezer until you want to assemble a soup. Label the different types of bone broth. You can make chicken broth out of chicken bones and use it as the bases for your favorite chicken soup recipes.
Budget Homemade Soup Making
Making soup on a budget is similar to using soup to reduce food waste. First, use your pot of bones to make broth. Strain and reserve the broth, then add veggies, herbs, potatoes, rice, or noodles until it tastes like a good soup. I like keeping my soups at 30% veggies, but you can use a lot of mis-matched veggies in a pot of soup. Use the single carrot, half an onion, and the like. Small amounts of lots of different things make for a very interesting soup.
Use a crock pot, or instant-pot to assemble your homemade soup recipes, and let the flavors meld over time. Homemade vegetable soup, with a nice bone broth base is very quick to assemble. Simply measure out a few cups of bone broth, add in your veggies, some black beans or similar protein source, and simmer for several hours in the crock pot, or even a dutch oven.
If you’re adding meats to your soup. I like pre-cooking my meats, like chicken breasts, or thighs, or beef cuts, before adding them to the soup. This helps seal in the meat’s flavor, and let’s me work with left over meats as well. One stray cooked chicken breast can make a very nice addition to chicken noodle soup, if finely chopped. And, that one pot of soup can serve 4+ people, instead of the chicken breast only serving one.
Nutrient Dense Homemade Soups
The more varied you make your stock and bone broth, the more nutrient dense your homemade soups will be. Add in things like onion skins, parsley stalks, celery leaves, and other not-normally eaten parts of veggies, helps you get all the nutrition from the food you buy. There’s a lot of vitamins, minerals, flavinoids, and antioxidants hidden in the skins of carrots, beets, onions, and even pumpkins. You can even add in some dried weeds from the garden, like nettle, dandelion, and more.
Just wash the veggies thoroughly before using the skins to make stock. And make sure to remove any mold or discolored areas before preparing the vegetables for stock or broth making.
Water soluble vitamins and minerals
Making vegetable broth, or stock, is one of the easiest ways to get all the water soluble vitamins and minerals that hang out in things like kale stalks, or onion skins and carrot tops. A vegetable soup recipe shouldn’t be just pristine, chopped veggies. It should have a nice base of vegetable stock, made from the skins and peels of dozens of different veggies, herbs, and more. This gives it the most nutrition, and give you the biggest health boost for your food dollars.
Soup as a Diet Food
Soup is a great way to make a balanced, healthy, and filling meal that also is friendly to your waist-line. One cup of bone broth contains less than 100 calories. Pair that with lots of vegetables, like tomatoes, carrots, kale, kolrabi, sweet potato, or squash, and you can assemble a very filling meal. You don’t have to add flour, bacon, pasta, or sausage to make a tasty soup.
Things like tomato soup, black bean soup, or even a nice chili, can be great as diet foods. Just go lightly on the cheddar cheese in the chili, and keep track of the sour cream.
A very filling soup is butternut curry. Use bone broth as the liquid, and cooked butternut squash as the main base. Blend the two together in a blender, and then add 1 can of coconut cream or coconut milk. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, and eat when hot. It is very filling.
Types of Soup: Clear stock and Cream Soups
You are probably familiar with many of the different types of soups available in the grocery store. Ones like mushroom, potato soup, or broccoli cheese soup, are made with a cream base. These creamy soup are heavier, often calorie dense soups. If you’re dieting, you may prefer to avoid these comfort food soups and make more of the clear stock based soups.
A clear stock soup is what many of our beef soups, chicken noodle soups, and even pho bowls and soup bowls are made from. Clear stock, often bone broth, or vegetable broth, is a great soup base since it carries lots of flavor, nutrition, gelatin, and minerals. Making sure your body is supplied with gelatin and minerals can be a good way to help prevent over-eating, as your nutritional needs are being met in an easily digestible manner.
Vegetable Soup stock
Make your own vegetable soup stock very easily. Save up vegetable scraps in a bag in your freezer. Scraps to save include: carrot skins and leaves, onion skins, parsley stems, celery leaves, beet skins and leaves, potato skins, sweet potato skins, pumpkin skins and seeds, kale stems, broccoli stems and leaves, radish leaves, and sweet pepper bits.
Avoid saving hot pepper bits, anything discolored or moldy, the outside leaves of cabbage, and possibly mustard greens. I might avoid fresh dill or any really strong or spicy herbs as they can over-power the stock and limit how you’re able to use it. I do like adding oregano, sage, and sometimes mint to my stock.
Every batch of vegetable stock will be different, based on what you put in it. When you have a bag full of stuff, throw it in a larger pot and cover with water. Bring to a simmer on a medium-high heat. Then, reduce the heat and let simmer for about 30-60 minutes. Let cool from boiling. Strain out, and save, the resulting stock and discard the skins, stems, and leaves to the compost.
Freeze some of the stock to have on hand for homemade soup. You can store a jar of stock in the fridge for about a week and a half. I prefer freezing for longer term storage. But, you can also pressure can bone broth, vegetable broth, and stock for even longer term storage.
Essential Herbs for Homemade Soup
Fresh herbs are a great place to start filling out the flavor profile of your homemade soup. Parsley, cilantro, sage, rosemary, thyme, basil, marjoram, chives, shallots, green onions, onions, oregano, garlic, bay leaf, and other garden herbs are great for soup flavoring, and for adding nutrition.
One of the interesting herbs to add to broth or stock when making it, is reishi mushroom. This mushroom is used to add an umami flavor, as well as lots of antioxidant and health benefits to clear broths.
You don’t have to use just green herbs for soup though. You can use turmeric, ginger, curry spices, chili powders, red pepper flakes, paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, and many other spices and spice blends in your soups.
Blends can be useful, since they contain a lot of different spices, so using a Greek or Italian spice blend can make it quicker to assemble a soup. Using pre-made spice blends can also give a new soup-maker more confidence, since the flavor profile is already determined.
Essential vegetables for Homemade Soup
Start with your favorite vegetables. Things like onions, carrots, celery, and potatoes, or your favorite frozen veggie medley. Then build from there. I love adding 3 or 4 different vegetables to a soup. Mild flavored vegetables like turnips, rutabagas, and kohlrabi absorb flavors and blend in. Broccoli and cauliflower can work in soups, I prefer adding them about 15 minutes before serving, to keep crisp.
Colored veggies like beets, purple or yellow carrots, squash and sweet potato. Even purple peas can add some pizazz and interest.
Grated vegetables thicken up and hide in chili and thick soups, use zucchini, cucumber, carrots, or even grated squash. Grated zucchini is a great way to hid veggies within chili, and surprisingly grated cucumber also blends right in. So do some dehydrated vegetables.
Stocking up for Homemade Soup Making
Freezing or dehydrating vegetables is a great way to stock up for soup making during the warmer months. Freeze grated vegetable abundance, like broccoli stalks, zucchini, cucumbers, or other summer squash, and save for winter chili cook-offs. Grated broccoli stems make a great base for broccoli and cheese soup.
Frozen, or canned, tomatoes make great additions to soups. And make a simple way to make your own tomato soup. If you cook beans from scratch, pre-cooking a larger batch and freezing or canning some can also help with your soup making prep.
I like having some dehydrated vegetables on hand for soup making. These can include mushrooms, zucchini, carrots, sweet potato, and powdered tomato skins. The dehydrated vegetables make a great thickening powder, when ground up. And if left as chunks, make a great agent for picking up bone broth and stock and absorbing it to make a non-thin soup.
I stock up on soup bones from local beef farmers during the summer, when the farmer’s market is running. Then use the frozen bones in winter, when I have more time to make soups and soups are more appreciated. I do the same with chicken bones, and turkey bones. Saving and freezing them until I want to make soup from them.
When stocking up for soup making, avoid canned vegetables. These are often already soft and often won’t be as nice in soups as fresh, frozen, or dehydrated vegetables will. You can freeze things like baked squash and pumpkin for use in blended soups, or to blend into thick soups like chili. The only canned goods I keep on hand for soups are tomato paste, crushed tomatoes, tomato sauce, coconut milk, and coconut cream.
If you own your own dehydrator, take advantage of greens like chard, kale, spinach, and lettuce abundances during the summer. These greens can be dehydrated and crumbled, or powdered, to add to winter soups, stews, and chili. Best of all, they’re barely noticeable, unlike frozen or canned greens! I also enjoy dehydrating parsley, sage, and other summer herbs in preparation for winter soups.
Back to You:
What’s your favorite homemade soup and how do you make it? Leave a comment!
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