Milk Soups

Having mastered basic soup, the next step is milk soup.

Cream soups divide into a couple of varieties. There are milk soups which share some lineage with chowders, and there are cream soups, which are smooth, processed soups made mostly of vegetables.

We’ll start with the most basic milk soup. Milk soups are the poverty soup of most of the pastoral planet. If your ancestors gave you the gene for lactose tolerance, then milk soups were a major part of their fastest, most convenient and always available meals. Milk soups are definitely in the 30 minute meal zone, especially with a modern stove and pre-prepped ingredients, but barely more in the “milk cow, collect eggs, build fire” realm. There are millions of variations, many only passed by word of mouth between the generations, from the honey-sweetened ones of eastern Europe to the toasted bread and milk version of Regency England to Amish potato soup with rivels. 

Milk soups have one oddity — to keep the milk from curdling, it needs to be cooked with a starch, and that can be rice, flour, pasta, dumplings, or potatoes. The earliest milk soups are likely the variations on hot milk with rough dumplings — a dough something like spatzle called rivels, ribbles, or similar sounding words — made of flour, an egg, and water. Think of rivels as a quick and dirty dumpling dough dropped into the boiling milk by pinches and sprinkles. Then pasta and rice came to substitute for the dumplings, and then the Columbian exchange brought potatoes. Milk soups could be sweet or savory, and being mostly carbs, easily digestible fats, and proteins, became comfort food. In descent, oatmeal and hot cereals with milk are relatives, and it’s perfectly reasonable to make an overnight milk soup for breakfast in a slow cooker.

Milk soups, by definition, are not vegan. Unsweetened, unflavored soy or maybe oat milk can be used, but basic potato soup and many milk soups are savory, and the sweetness of sweetened or flavored plant milks is unwelcome. Just keep that in mind.

The master milk soup equivalent to the basic broth soup is potato soup that starts with butter and chopped onions and celery, but generally not carrots. (Try it sometime, you may or may not like it with carrots.) 

To start, 

• Chop 2 onions into a fine dice and
• Melt 3 tablespoons of butter in a heavy bottomed pot.
• Sauté the onions in the butter until they are soft and starting to brown, about 10 minutes over medium heat.
• While the onions are cooking, finely dice 2-3 stalks of celery and 
• Peel about 3 pounds of potatoes, then dice and rinse well.
• When the onions are light brown, add the celery and stir well to mix. (If you’re experimenting with carrots, add them here, about 1 cup of diced/thinly sliced carrots). Allow the celery to wilt and soften (2-4 minutes) then
• Add the diced potatoes, a half tablespoon of salt, and 2 cups of water — not enough to fully cover, but enough to steam.
• Cover the pot and simmer for 10-15 minutes while the potatoes cook. 
• If using, make rivels by mixing 2 cups of flour with 2 eggs — mix with a fork — and up to 2 tablespoons of water to make a rough, dry, clumpy dough. Add more flour by tablespoons if the dough is too wet. Set aside.
• When the potatoes are soft, add up to 6 cups of milk and let the soup come back up to a gentle boil. 
• Drop the rivels dough into the soup by pinches and rubbing clumps between your fingers so they fall into bits. Stir the soup well to keep the rivels from clumping up on the bottom of the pot. 
• Allow to simmer for a few minutes to thicken. Add salt and pepper to taste. 

You have a choice to make on the potatoes. Floury potatoes like Russets will make a thick soup with a mouth feel like thin mashed potatoes; waxy potatoes like reds and golds will make a thinner soup with more structure. Or you can use a mix of both types.

Potato soup takes a nice garnish of cheese, bacon, or green onions, or all of the above, or it’s perfectly satisfying and a fairly complete meal on its own. Potatoes are remarkably nutritious, including protein and necessary vitamins and minerals, and really only lack fat to be a complete food.

The first major variation is just switch to sweet potatoes. This is the best way to vegan a milk soup — sweet potatoes play beautifully with oat milk, coconut milk, and other sweeter plant milks. The onions will provide both a sweet and savory under-flavor, and you can substitute carrots for the celery or add carrots. Spice sweet potato soup with cinnamon and nutmeg as well as salt. Sweet potato soup also works well with a tablespoon of peanut butter or crushed peanuts per bowl and a dash of your favorite hot sauce. 

Rivels don’t really work with in smooth soups or sweet potato soup, but you can always make them separately like spaetzle (similar, if wetter dough, dropped into boiling water, then fished out and served as a base under gravy or with seasonings) and sprinkle in a finished soup if you like the taste/texture. 

To turn either of these into smooth, blended soups, you need a good immersion blender. I am on my 5th as an adult, and the one I have now is the one I recommend — the Vitamix immersion blender. It’s one of the most expensive, but it’s a Vitamix in handheld form. It’s the best immersion blender on the market. I do not recommend any of these:

• The Breville broke about a week into owning it, and Breville has terrible customer support. The immersion blender also doesn’t fit in a wide mouth mason jar, so you can only use it with your pans or the special plastic jar it comes with.
• The Kitchenaid didn’t survive a year. It was okay, but didn’t stand up to normal use (morning smoothies, a soup a couple times a week).
• The Cuisinart simply wasn’t very good as a blender. It couldn’t get down to a smooth smoothie or a smooth soup.
• The Mueller didn’t have enough power.
• I do not recommend the various no name/random named Amazon versions. They’re all cheap junk with a good chance of either poisoning you thanks to poor construction and unidentified metals, or just breaking. 

For sweet potato soup, if you want it smooth, just hit it with the immersion blender, for about 3-5 minutes, moving it around and slowly increasing speed until it’s at the smoothness you want. A drizzle of cream or coconut cream looks lovely for presentation. 

From the basic potato soup, you have most of the tools to make the category that is best described as loaded baked potato soup. Follow the basic potato soup recipe, but instead of butter, dice several slices of bacon and cook the onions and bacon together until the bacon is crispy. (Regular mirepoix of 1:1:2 carrots, celery, and onion work well in baked potato soups if you want extra veggies in your soups.) To keep it closer to vegetarian, you can use vegetarian baco bits; just add them at the end and use butter as the initial fat.

The (unknown authenticity) recipe I have for “Belfast Potato Soup” adds 4-8 ounces of diced chicken with the bacon, use chicken broth instead of water, and add about 4 tablespoons of butter at the end. It’s a damn good soup, regardless of actual origin. I don’t recommend blending it — the chicken gets grainy and sandy — but you can cook it until the potatoes totally fall apart. 

For the essential Loaded Baked Potato soup, add a 12 oz bag of frozen chopped broccoli with the milk, and about 2 cups of grated cheddar cheese (fresh grated will blend best). At the end, garnish with sour cream, green onions (if you have them) and crumbled bacon or baco bits. You can hit this one with the immersion blender to make a thick puree if you like.

Or steam the chopped broccoli in a microwave or small pan, and only add the grated cheddar cheese, chopped broccoli, and sour cream plus other additions as garnishes at the end.

On the sweet potato side, you can add whatever orange vegetables you like — butternut squash, carrots, pumpkin all work well with sweet potatoes or substituted for sweet potatoes. If you like curry, you can use curry spices instead of sweet ones. Want it sweeter? Add a peeled, cored and diced apple to the blend. 

If it tastes good with a potato, it will likely taste good in a milk soup made with potatoes. If it tastes good with a sweet potato, it works with a sweet potato soup. 

From milk soups, you can move directly into chowders. Some chowders call for roux, which is the basis for cream soups, but it’s not strictly necessary given that most chowders are potato based. Just either scoop out some of the soft potatoes at the post-boil stage and mash them, then return to the pan, or dump in a quarter- to half-cup of instant mashed potato flakes.

The second big difference with chowders is instead of water, they’ll use the broth that coordinates with their major protein, like bottled clam juice for clam or other fish/seafood chowders, or chicken broth for chicken-corn chowder. Most will also use bacon as the primary fat for caramelizing the mirepoix, and most will call for cream at the end, though it’s not strictly necessary. It does add richness and fat, which is a good idea in winter.

Chicken-corn chowder is basically the Belfast recipe above, and add corn at the end — either canned creamed or frozen kernels. Corn Chowder is the Belfast recipe without chicken and with corn.

Popcorn chowder is the Belfast recipe, minus the chicken, and with the addition of two cups of corn and garnished with popped popcorn instead of crackers or croutons.

Ham chowder is the Belfast recipe with ham (or a ham bone) instead of the chicken. Sweet corn is usually added, as for corn chowder.

Salmon chowder is the Belfast recipe using mirepoix, minus the chicken, and adds 1-2 cans of salmon, a cup of corn (or a can of corn/creamed corn) and a cup of grated cheese at the end. 

Manhattan (red) clam chowder is a broth-based soup. Make it like minestrone, add a bottle of clam juice and 3 medium or large peeled, diced potatoes with the broth, and canned clams, instead of the beans and other vegetables. Up the Italian seasonings. 

Shrimp chowder is the base potato recipe, adds 1 8 oz package of cream cheese and a couple tablespoons of dry white wine about 15 minutes before serving, stir to melt the cream cheese, then add half a pound of small frozen and defrosted shrimp without heads, tails, shells, or vein. Frozen and defrosted salad shrimp are perfect, though add them at the VERY end, since they don’t need cooking, just heating through.