Healthier Soups

Food developers are all too aware there are a number of ways to create any finished product. Formulating healthy soups is no exception.

To score a wining product, you need to know the marketing parameters before perusing the shelf for ingredients. Will the soup be sold to an upscale audience looking for fresh quality? To boomers hoping to reduce salt content? To the diet conscious searching for lower-fat products? Or will it be sold to moms scanning ingredient labels for natural-sounding ingredients?

Garden varieties

Fortunately, soups are generally thought of as nutritious. “It totally depends on how it’s made, but the bones of most soups are healthy,” says Dianna Fricke, CRC, CWPC, executive chef, R&D, J.R. Simplot Company, Boise, ID.

Vibrant vegetables with fresh-cooked texture signal a vitamin-packed, carefully prepared product. This format is more easily achieved with frozen or refrigerated soups. “You have the ability to have vegetables that still have texture, because you’re not retorting,” says Fricke. “Refrigerated or frozen products give the product developer an opportunity to add things at different stages.”

In foodservice, the key to quality is not holding items for extended periods. Even in the best conditions, vegetables in a soup held in a jacketed kettle will lose color and turn mushy.

It’s important to not overprocess vegetables, notes Christopher Stepan, corporate chef, Vegetable Juices, Inc., Bedford Park, IL. The standard kitchen technique for setting flavor and color is to blanch vegetables at approximately 180°F, and then shock them with cold water. Industrially, pasteurization helps accomplish the same effect. “It sets it, so that it has a longer life at high temperatures,” he says. “Our products have been pasteurized, so the colors are very good.”

Vegetable purées also help provide a longer life, notes Stepan. “They will maintain color,” he says. “The flavor is better. You don’t have to worry about losing texture. The purées are going to stay what they are. They’re not going to break down to any noticeable degree.”

It’s important, though, to be aware that certain additives, like acidulants, can sometimes affect color over time.

Puréed vegetables have many uses in soup. Fricke offers puréed apple-ginger soup as an example, or vichyssoise (a cold, creamy, potato-and-leek soup).

Vegetable purées and blends “can be added to any soup base, such as broth, cream or potatoes, as a simple way to incorporate regional flavors,” says Cathy Katavich, director technical sales, Gilroy Foods & Flavors, Gilroy, CA. She cites a blend of a variety of herbs and vegetables, including peppers, onion, cilantro and lime, to give a distinctive Latin taste to soups.

Purées can add color, bold flavor and vegetable nutrition to soups. Some also incorporate bits of herbs and vegetable chunks to also add appealing texture, Katavich says, and “to give the purées authentic, fresh flavor.”

Broccoli purée has long been a key ingredient in cream of broccoli soups. Mirepoix purées, blends of onions, carrots and celery, are used in many applications. Stepan recommends using 15% to 20% butternut squash purée in a butternut cream soup.

For “stealthy healthy” nutrition, “cauliflower, at very low percentages, can be used to up the vegetable value in a soup,” says Stepan. “Adding 5% to 10% would increase the vegetable value without affecting the flavor of the soup. Cucumber can be used in a purée, about 10%, and depending on what other vegetables you put in there, then it could be cloaked. Butternut would be a good one to cloak it with,” he says, noting that pumpkin also has a strong flavor capable of masking cucumber. He also suggests a combination of beet and cucumber for a beet soup to tone down the cucumber flavor.

Cucumber can also be added to a Greek egg lemon soup with a chicken stock base. “Without curdling, you process it so that you cook the eggs in to create a cream,” says Stepan. “There is no cream in the soup, but the ‘cream’ comes from the blending of the egg and the slow cooking of the chicken stock.” Some lemon and a garnish of rice then finishes the soup, and “it wouldn’t be unusual to put diced cucumber in that,” he notes. The foodservice operator can add the finishing touch. Instead of chicken stock, “you can use vegetable stock and turn the whole thing into a vegan extravaganza.”

Classic gazpacho has cucumber, diced onions and vegetables, plus sherry vinegar. “In industrial applications, as soon as you put the sherry vinegar in, the cucumbers turn into pickles,” cautions Stepan. “Recently, I’ve taken some sherry concentrate and I’ve used that in place of the sherry vinegar. So I get the flavor without pickling the cucumber, and it keeps the fresh top notes.”

Stepan recently created a gazpacho using clarified, microfiltrated tomato juice. “We keep all the flavor of the tomato, but you don’t get a lot of the aftertaste and heavy mouthfeel from the fibers,” he says, just “all the top notes from the tomato.”