soups and stews

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Modern French Stews

There’s nothing more comforting than a stew on a chilly night. In this online cooking class, you will learn the essential equipment and ingredients to create French-style stews, plus how to make a bouquet garni and how to cut up your own stew meat. You’ll then use what you’ve learned to make three stew recipes—Beef Burgundy, French pork stew, and chicken bouillabaisse—that, with time and attention, transform humble, less expensive, ingredients such as chuck-eye roast and pork butt, into memorable dishes.

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  • Soups & Stews

Classic Soups

Would you make 30 versions of French onion soup to find the recipe with the richest broth and the deepest onion flavor? Or make dozens of cream of tomato soups to find the best way to preserve its bright flavor and color? Or test if simmering is better than boiling? We did, using flavor-enhancing techniques we've come to perfect over years of work in the test kitchen. Few dishes can fill, comfort, and satisfy like a big bowl of hearty soup. Good soup is easy to make, but great soup requires a whole lot of know-how. Learn it all, plus some great recipes and tips on blending soups and making them in advance, in this lesson.

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  • Soups & Stews

Hearty Beef and Barley Soup

Beef and barley soup is a savory, stick-to-your-ribs meal in a bowl that will satisfy meat, starch, and vegetable cravings all at once. This recipe uses a homemade beef stock that is made even meatier by the addition of browned bits of beef and sautéed cremini mushrooms; both add hearty flavor to the soup.

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  • Soups & Stews

French Pork Stew

Beef is king when it comes to meat stews but it’s the not the only choice. A French boiled dinner known as potée features a mix of fresh and smoked cuts of pork in a light broth. It served as the inspiration for our French pork stew that is incredibly simple—this recipe requires no browning of ingredients or makes zero mess on the stovetop. This French peasant recipe varies from region to region, but most versions combine multiple pork cuts, always including one smoked cut; sausages; and a mix of cabbage, onions, and sturdy root vegetables. The dish is plenty porky, and because it’s typically not thickened, the broth has a light, clean taste.

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  • Soups & Stews

Our Favorite Chili

As far as meat and bean chilis go, this version is the real deal. Slow simmered chunks of beef, beans that have been brined and cooked in a flavorful broth, and dried chilis ground into onions, garlic, and spices all work together to give this chili depth and character. This is not your quick weeknight chili, but one bite of this and you will understand why these extra steps matter. Discover how to buy, toast, and grind your own chilis into powder. Learn our quick-soak method for dried beans and how that contributes to their overall flavor. Our comprehensive video tutorial takes all the guesswork out of this recipe, and we will share what mistakes and pitfalls to avoid. By the end of this recipe, you will understand what great chili is.

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  • Soups & Stews

Easy All-American Chili

This is the iconic chili most Americans know—the one made with ground beef rather than chunks of beef. We're using both chili powder and canned beans to make this a simple supper. But all too often this style of chili is lackluster. The beef is pale and rubbery, the chili flavor is faint, and the beans taste, well, like a can. To keep this chili simple, but improve the overall outcome, we employed a number of tricks in the test kitchen. Our favorite choices for condiments include diced fresh tomatoes, diced avocado, sliced scallions, chopped red onion, chopped cilantro leaves, sour cream, and shredded Monterey Jack or cheddar cheese.

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  • Soups & Stews

Best Chicken Soups

The best chicken soup recipes start with chicken stock that usually takes hours to make. Our revolutionary stock making technique reduces this time to under an hour and delivers the maximum amount of flavor (without requiring a pressure cooker!). You will learn how to use this homemade stock to prepare three delicious chicken soup recipes. (And don’t worry, we also include information on the best store-bought stock.) First, learn how to make a basic chicken noodle soup, a must in any cook’s repertoire. Next, our creamy chicken and vegetable soup recipe starts with chicken stock and quickly transforms into a rich and satisfying meal. Finally, learn to make chicken tortilla soup with easy to find supermarket ingredients. Fill your freezer with this satisfying chicken stock and easy weeknight meals are at your fingertips.

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  • Soups & Stews

Broccoli-Cheese Soup

This easy recipe is sure to become a family favorite. To make homemade Broccoli Cheese soup with strong broccoli flavor we sautéed chopped florets and stems in a little butter, added some water, and let it simmer, covered, until it was super-overcooked. The flavor was right but the color was all wrong. To get rid of the unappealing gray hue and make our soup a vibrant green we accepted some help from an unexpected ingredient.

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  • Soups & Stews

White Chicken Chili

While beef chili certainly is the gold standard in the chili world, we love its Southwestern counterpart, white chicken chili. This dish of tender, juicy chicken and a green, fresh chile-based sauce can be delicious, but too often it's not. The chicken is overcooked, the sauce can be bland and thin, and the chile heat can range from barely there to full-blown hot. We found not one, but three solutions to these problems. Learn how to make our recipe in this online cooking class.

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  • Soups & Stews

Creamy Chicken and Vegetable Soup

Chowder frequently means one thing: seafood (usually clams). However, for much of landlocked, rural America, chicken was the traditional choice for a creamy, chowder-like soup. The rest of the recipe (potatoes, cream, bacon) is the same, but the base is chicken stock and the creamy soup contains chunks of chicken meat as well as lots of vegetables. Many old-fashioned recipes for this American soup rely on potatoes to thicken the broth. We prefer to thicken the soup with a little flour added to the pot just before the stock. The flour is cooked briefly in the pot with the sautéed onion, garlic, and thyme to remove its raw flavor. We still add potatoes to make the soup hearty, opting for Yukon Gold potatoes because they hold their shape well. We like carrot and red bell pepper but this recipe could accommodate almost any fresh vegetable. A cup of cream added to the nearly finished soup provides the requisite silky texture and richness. Once the chowder is done, it should be served immediately. But this course will also teach you how to make components of the dish ahead of time.

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  • Soups & Stews

Ultimate Chilis

Chili is one of those recipes that can be very simple to quite involved, and the effort you put into it shows in every bite. Sure, we’ve all satisfied our hunger with a can of beans and tomatoes thrown into spicy browned meat, but we wanted to create the best chili recipes. We discovered that with a modicum of effort, we could produce deep, earthy flavors in our chili, and that these techniques would translate into deeper, richer flavors for many styles of chili. In this online cooking class, learn about the dried and fresh chilis, and how to work with them, and when to add your chili powder or paste to the pot. Discover the secrets of how to make chili powder from dried chiles, and a paste by adding fresh chilis. We will share common pitfalls to avoid and mistakes commonly made, and how to fix them. See what equipment and ingredients lend these dishes great flavor, and finally try our recipes for three styles of chili.

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  • Soups & Stews

Old-Fashioned Chicken Noodle Soup

No recipe repertoire is complete without a good recipe for chicken noodle soup. This version is basic and no-frills, but it delivers better chicken flavor than most of us are accustomed to. The key is making a rich homemade chicken stock to use as the soup's base. Instead of using chicken legs, backs, and/or wings as demonstrated earlier in the lesson, you'll be making your stock with a whole chicken. You'll be cutting it into pieces, but the chicken breast requires special treatment because the meat will be shredded and added to the soup. The simplicity of this soup lends it to variations of all sorts. Once you've mastered it, in place of the egg noodles, you can try wild rice, cooked dried beans, or small pasta shapes like orzo or ditalini; season it with herbs of your choice; or change up the vegetables to suit your taste. Once chicken noodle soup is done, it should be served immediately; those noodles will become soft and mushy very quickly. If you like, you can make the stock a day in advance; just refrigerate the stock and poached breast meat separately until you're ready to make the soup.

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