In this early 90s episode, Arlene is cooking up cream of potato soup and broccoli au gratin soup. Both are rich, hearty, and perfect for a cold winter day.
As creamy soups, both have lots of dairy. They are also thickened with flour. Arlene shows how this intimidating technique can be done easily with a few simple steps, so you always get a creamy soup with no lumps!
Arlene’s Cream of Potato Soup
A classic soup that can be garnished with all kinds of savory fixings!
Ingredients
- 6-8 medium-sized potatoes, peeled, cubed, and rinsed
- water
- 1/4 cup butter
- 1/2 cup chicken broth
- salt and pepper
- 1 Tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
- 1/2 tsp onion salt
- 1/2 tsp garlic salt
- 2-3 cups milk, scalded
- 1 cup cold milk
- 1/3 cup flour
- bacon bits, shredded cheese, fresh dill, parsley, paprika, and other garnishes
Instructions
- Place potatoes in a 3-quart saucepan, cover with water and, over medium-high heat, bring to a boil. Cover saucepan and continue boiling until potatoes are very soft and breaking apart. Do not drain.
- Add butter and chicken broth. Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes. Add salt, pepper, parsley, onion and garlic salts. Stir well to blend.
- In a saucepan, scald 2 to 3 cups milk (heat until just simmering around the edges, but not boil. This keeps the milk warm so it won't bring down the temperature of the soup when it's mixed in later.)
- With a potato masher, mash the potatoes in the pot into tiny bits. Add scalded milk to the potatoes. Gradually heat soup to boiling.
- In a deep bowl, combine 1 cup milk and 1/3 cup four and beat with a whisk until smooth. Slowly pour flour-milk mixture into potatoes to thicken, stirring constantly, so it does not stick. As soup heats back up, the flour will thicken it.
- Ladle into soup bowls and top with bacon bits, cheddar cheese, fresh dill or sprinkle parsley on top. Makes 6 servings. Enjoy!
Cream of Broccoli Soup Au Gratin
This has the flavors of a classic French casserole, but in a soup!
Ingredients
- 1 bunch broccoli, florets only
- water
- 2 can chicken broth (15 oz)
- 1/4 cup butter
- salt and pepper (to taste)
- 2 cups milk, scalded
- 2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
- 1 cup cold milk
- 1/3 cup flour
Instructions
- Place the broccoli florets in a large saucepan and cover with cold water. Cook until very tender, about 15-20 minutes. Do not drain!
- In a separate pot, scald 2 cups of milk. (Heat until just simmering around edges, but not boiling.) Add chicken broth and butter to broccoli and continue cooking. Salt and pepper to taste. Add hot milk and cheese. Stir to blend.
- Combine cold milk and four for the thickening. Mix very well, making sure there are no lumps. While soup is boiling, slowly pour the cold milk and flour mixture into the soup, stirring consistently to prevent lumps. Continue until desired thickness is reached. Makes 6 to 8 servings. Enjoy!
Transcript
- Hi, welcome to “At Home” today. You know, it’s always great when you stop by for a visit. I feel like you’re my friends when you come by and you write the letters and you say how much you enjoy it. And I’m glad when you do that. Today, we’re gonna talk about soups. I can remember coming home from school ’cause we lived close to the school when I was a kid, and it would be lunchtime. My mother would be chopping the vegetables and getting all the things ready because she was cooking a pot of soup for dinner that night. And she really could make vegetable soup like nobody else. Of course, I’m just partial because that’s what we were used to. But there’s all kinds of soups out there now, and we’re gonna make a couple of varieties today. I read in one of my entertainment books that if you wanna have a get-together and you don’t have a whole lotta money to spend on entertaining, like a Friday night when you have some friends over or maybe after a football game or whenever, make a couple of different kinds of soups and have a soup buffet, and put some crusty bread out there and some different kinds of crackers, and maybe a nice tossed salad, and it’s a great buffet. Everybody likes soup. That’s what I was just reading in this cookbook, and it says people love soup. They seem happier when they put a big bowl of soup down before them. They said sometimes we suspect that people were so fond of soup because it gives them a chance to eat a big chunk of bread Well, that’s probably true, because there’s nothing better than a nice big chunk of crusty bread with a bowl of soup. And people for a lotta years used to just use soup because they wanted to clean up the scraps. Soup has come into its own. There are all kinds of varieties, and the flavors that you can get by putting a lot of… Marrying a lot of different flavors and herbs together can create such a delicious pot of soup that that’s what we’re gonna do today. So get your paper and pencil handy. We’re gonna whip through this. We got a couple of different kinds, so stay with us. We’ll be right back after this special hint just for you. Here’s today’s “At Home Hint.” If you’re creamed soup is not thick enough, add instant potato flakes to the hot soup until it’s the desired consistency. If you’ve got a helpful hint that you would like to share with us, we want to hear from you. Send your hint to At Home Hints, CTV, Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. Welcome back. One of the first soups that we’re gonna start with today is cream of potato soup, and this is an old-fashioned recipe the way mom used to make it years and years ago. What I have done basically to get us started so that we would have time to finish it for you is taken about six to eight good-sized, I like to use the red potatoes. Let me get outta the steam here so I can see you better. And we just cubed them, peeled them and cubed them, cleaned them, washed them really good. It’s really important for you to wash that potato, because you’ll get this kind of a starchiness that will come off it, and you don’t need all of that. And a lotta times, if you don’t clean them real good, when they come up to a boil, you’ll get like this film or scum or a foam on the top. If that happens, you keep spooning that off while it’s cooking. So we’ve been cooking these for a while, and this is just the potatoes, and it kinda looks like what potatoes look like when you’re gonna mash them. And what I do is let them cook till they’re so tender that you can mash them. I’m gonna add a chunk of butter, ’cause this will definitely add flavor. There’s a lot of different ways to make soup, and particularly this cream of potato soup, and maybe the way that you make it is a little different, but to each his own, right? You experiment, whichever tastes best for you, that’s the one you wanna do it with, okay? All right, these potatoes cannot be too soft. In other words, you could put these on and let them cook for a long time because they should be falling apart, that tender and that soft. And when they get to that point where you can get that potato masher in there, just get it in there and start mashing them. Now some people put them in a blender to really almost puree them. I don’t like big chunks of potato in it, but I don’t like it that thin. I like to have little tiny bits of potato here and there. So you keep boiling them and keep mashing. This is something you start, oh, I’d start about an hour before I wanted to serve it, or you can cook it earlier in the day and let it chill down, and then just reheat it. This soup freezes very well. It holds very well. Anything though that has a cream to it, you need to refrigerate. Be sure to refrigerate if you’re not gonna use it right away. Okay, so while that’s still cooking and the butter is melting, all right, now we’re going to add our seasonings. Now remember, potatoes absorb salt. If you make any kind of a dish, and you have over-salted something, if you will put a whole potato in with that, the salt will immediately go into that potato, you can lift the potato out and you have saved your dish that you’re cooking. So potato soup will take a lot of salt. I try not to put too much in, because everybody can salt it according to their taste when they get to the table. But we’re gonna do probably about a teaspoon and a half. Okay, that’s the salt. Now, I also like to flavor it. Let me see here, we’ll go with some onion salt. I would say about a half a teaspoon of onion salt. Again, this is just to flavor it. Some people put onions in there. I like the pure potato. I don’t like the little bits of onion in there. All right, and we’re gonna keep letting it cook, keep it going. Okay, we can probably turn this down just a nip, but every time you add, you wanna stir it around. You can see, yep, just in itself that it’s starting to thicken. All right, now we’re gonna add some garlic salt. Just about the same amount, about a half a teaspoon. Again, that just flavors it. And I like to use the fresh parsley, so these are my kitchen shears that I use for nothing else except for in the kitchen, and they’re good and clean and sterilized. I like to clip the parsley right into the pot. Okay, now of course, you don’t want these to be the scissors that the kids are cutting and pasting and gluing because your soup no doubt will taste a little on the strange side. So keep those shears outta their hands, ’cause, boy, my mom was always looking for the shears, ’cause my brothers or I would have them, and we’re making this and pretending to do that, and she would be searching the house, where are the scissors? And we would always have them, and she would always be upset, because we had dulled the blades by cutting things that we weren’t supposed to be cutting with them, like usually something this thick and we’re gnawing at it, you know. She didn’t like that too well. Okay, so this potato soup is coming along fine. This will serve quite a bit as you can see. You don’t wanna put too much water when you start to do the potatoes because a potato doesn’t have enough of a flavor itself for you to just cook it just in its own water. So you have to add a little flavoring to it. Now what I do to that is I add, you see what I’ve just done, this is a no-no. You never leave the lids on, sorry about that. I just add about a half of a can of chicken bouillon. What that does is gives it a foundation for flavor, okay? So we’re gonna mix that up, let that come back to… Can you see how creamy that is? Can the camera get how creamy that is already? Now to make this a cream soup, we want to add some milk to it, a milk product. And what I do is I take… Usually if I’m making this for company, I will usually not use 1% milk which we usually use in our house. I usually will use the whole milk, because if this is what you’re serving, you want the best for them. If they’re on restricted diets, that’s fine, go ahead and do that. But I would say that’s two to three cups of milk, and we’re gonna scald it. Remember what a scald is? A scald is just taking the chill off where you see the bubbles gonna start to form, that’s a scald. You would not want to add the cold milk into this directly ’cause it would not blend well together. All right, while that’s going to town, we’ll let that cook until the milk comes to a scald, let me tell you about the next soup that we have going. You know what I didn’t do? I didn’t add my pepper to this. Let me add some pepper. Now I like lots of pepper in this, so just go for it. Okay, pepper, you can use white pepper. I didn’t have any today, but white pepper’s nice because you don’t see the little black flecks in there. But it doesn’t matter, ’cause it tastes good anyway. So we do the black pepper, okay, to your taste, to your desired taste. Now I’m gonna put the lid on that and tell you about the second soup that we’re doing, which is cream of broccoli cheese soup. Now this soup, I’ve taken one bunch of broccoli and just cut the tops off, just the flowered parts if you can see that, okay? And I’ve put that in with water just to cover it, and I’ve let it cook and cook and cook until it’s just breaking apart, all right? And that’s cooking down also. Again, broccoli does not have that flavor to support a cream sauce because it doesn’t have a distinctive enough flavor. So what I do there is I add the chicken soup to it also. Let me get it going. And I add a can and a half, two cans, one can, however much you wanna make, ’cause this is one of those soups that can stretch, all right? If you have all the stuff to make a lot, go for it. If you don’t, and if you’re just gonna serve a few people, you wouldn’t need as much, but you have to add some chicken bouillon cubes to that, dissolve those and put them in, that’s fine. However many people that you want to serve with, that’s what you keep in mind. All right, so we’re gonna let this broccoli go ahead and continue to cook. Let’s see how the scald, okay, we’re about ready to go with this. Let me turn this potato soup down just a bit, and let’s go and put that back on. Always keep them covered, because if you don’t, it will cook down very fast and doesn’t have time, all your broth of your soup will cook away, in other words. All right, we’re gonna add… Let me get my little doflotchy here, and we’re gonna add the scalded milk into the potatoes, all right? Look how thick that is already. What thickens it, you say, is the starch from the potato that has cooked out. And like I said, the earlier you can put the potatoes on to cook, the better it is, okay? That’s just about right there. All right, now we want this to come up to a boil because we’re gonna thicken it with some of our… It’s too milky right now, and we’re not gonna be able to… It’s not the right consistency for a cream soup. So we’ll let that come up to a boil, and while we’re doing that, I’ll show you how we make the thickening for it. Now we’ll take some cold milk. Usually when we make a thickening, when we’ve made gravies, we’ve used water and flour. But because it’s a cream soup, we’re gonna start with cold milk, okay? I’m gonna make enough for both soups, so this isn’t how much you’d make for one soup. This is how much you’d make for both of them. And we’re gonna add flour to this. I’m gonna show you how to do this to get it without lumps, because some of you are saying, “Yeah, you tell us to do it without lumps, “but mine always has lumps.” Well, hopefully, mine won’t today. But we’re gonna start to add some flour to this. Notice how carefully I measure because you can always add more if you need to. You start with whatever the liquid is, you make it cold, very cold, all right? And then you add the flour, and you just begin to whip till it whips in, all right, making sure. See, if you do this with a fork or you do this with a spoon, what happens is the lumps form before you ever get it stirred. So if you start just a little at a time to blend it in, start at one part of the bowl and just start whipping, and then slowly gather it in, you won’t get the lumps. Now that’s not quite thick enough for that much milk, so let’s add a bit more. That’s too much. Here we go, let’s try it again. You say, “Arlene, I never do it that way.” Well, you know, I never did either until mom showed me. And so when she showed me, I figured, well, if it works for her, it’ll probably work for me, and it does. See, there’s no lumps. You can see that’s just as creamy and smooth as smooth as can be. Now the trick is to get this smooth into this without lumps. So why is it everything we do wants to be without lumps, except when you’re making dumplings. Then you want them to stay in lumps. All right, here we go. Is there anybody here with me today? Is Ronnie with me? Okay, good. This crew is with me and I appreciate that. All right, this has to be boiling, which it is. You can see that the milk has gone in with the potato. There’s nice broccoli, I’m sorry, parsley. Gee, everything’s green. All right, we’re gonna start pouring this, and this has to be boiling. Okay, let me see. See, when I stirred that, it stopped doing that, and we don’t want that. Let me see if the fire is on here, yeah. Okay, that one’s coming up to a boil. Okay, when we thicken this, then essentially the soup is finished. And you cannot do it unless it’s boiling. You will have nothing but paste, and it will not be creamy, you’ll have lumps, it will not be good. You must have it boiling when you add the thickening. All right? When I serve this, I would serve it with the crusty bread or some crackers, make a nice salad to go with it. Soup is hearty. My mom used to say it sticks to your ribs, if you know what I mean. And on a hot or a cold night, people say, “Oh, in the hot weather, “I’d never think to have soup,” but you know, sometimes it’s refreshing. Sometimes we go into a restaurant and you think, “Boy, a bowl of soup even on a chilly night tastes good.” Okay, we’re about there. Mom says a watched pot never boils, either. But it’s boiling, here we go. All right, now I’m gonna start to pour in a steady stream, just in a steady stream. Don’t dump it all at once, just in a steady stream. Now you say, “Well, it doesn’t feel “like it’s getting thick,” but see it’s because it’s not hot. Well, as soon as it gets hot, it will thicken up. You keep pouring it. You can tell by this in your hand if it’s at the right consistency or not. Now you say, “What if I get too much in there?” If you get too much in there, you can always add some more milk to it to thin it out, ’cause that’s what they do in restaurants a lot, they thin it out. This is not there yet, I can tell by the way it’s not thick enough, so you keep going, keep stirring. You gotta keep it moving in the pot. If it sticks in one spot, you know what’ll happen? You have a mess. Can you see the difference in the consistency? All right, what’s the… Everybody’s giggling over there about something. All right, we’re gonna keep adding some more, add some more, because you can tell by when this whip gets hard to move around in the pot, you know you’re about there. Now if it ever gets like this and you can’t move it, you know you’ve gone beyond the point. It doesn’t happen to often, but when I was learning some of those times those things happened. This is the cream of potato soup. Now some people put cheese in theirs. My husband doesn’t like cheese in his potato soup. He just likes it like this in a bowl with some crackers. So I don’t usually put it in, but if I make it for company and I know that they like it, then of course I would add cheese to it. All right, now when this comes back up to a boil, you say, “Well, I don’t see much of a difference now,” but when that comes up to a boil, it should be very thick. And the longer it cooks, it will thicken. Now I might have to add a little bit more to that, but at this point you can wait and see. Develop a wait and see attitude. And we’re gonna check this out over here, ’cause the broccoli is cooking away. All right, let me see my spoon here. Now remember we’ve added the chicken soup to this, okay? Now we need to season it. Let me turn this one down. Let me think here. I’m gonna add just a little bit more thickening to this because it’s still moving in the pot, too. There we go, all right. Cream soups are nice because they do tend to stick to your ribs a little more than the ones with the broth, and this is a nice accompaniment, like I said, leftovers, you can use those for the kids for lunch with a grilled cheese sandwich or something like that, but this is the old-fashioned… You see the consistency of that soup now? It’s a thicker soup, that’s what you’re looking for, right about where we are, okay? Okay, now what I would do is just put the lid on and turn this as low as I could, and it’s ready to be served. If you’re ready with your guest, it’s ready to go. Okay, here’s our broccoli soup. How much time do we have, Ron? About five minutes, okay, we have time. The broccoli soup is going. Again, we’re gonna scald some milk because this is a cream soup also. Now the broccoli, I’m gonna make it au gratin. So I am gonna add cheese to that, because I think the flavor, here we go, the flavor is good with broccoli, ’cause a lot of people like broccoli with cheese sauce if they go to a restaurant and they get a vegetable or whatever. So I put the pepper, lots of pepper. Let’s do salt, just gonna do salt outta this because this won’t take as much salt as the potato because like I said, the potato absorbs it. So we’re gonna salt that down. I also am gonna put a chunk of butter. See, now some people will make what they call a roux, where I was talking with Lisa that works with us here, and she said, “Oh, are you gonna make a roux?” Which is a butter and flour that you do in a skillet and then you use that as a thickening. But mom didn’t do it that way. I know what she means, but mom didn’t do it that way, so I’m doing it the way mom did, and this is the way mom made it. She would put the butter in the soup so that it would cook into the vegetable. And then as soon as… And this broccoli, I used only the tops, but if you wanted to use the bottoms, you can peel them and use them, chop them down, and use them also in this. That makes fine soup vegetables, because anything that you’re going to submerge in a liquid and let it cook and cook and cook, you’re gonna have time for it to tenderize, even if it would seem like it’s not going to. All right, we scalded the milk. Now I’m gonna add the milk. Okay, we’ve added our scalded milk to the broccoli. Now this has a chicken base, this has a chicken base. All right, I’d better fire that up a little bit. Now this is when I add my cheese, and this is cheddar cheese, use any kind you want. If they like mozzarella better, that’s fine, but it’s better for you to have it in little tiny pieces like this, grated or shredded, than to put a big chunk in. If you put a big chunk in, it gets stringy. It does not incorporate with the broth very well. So just put your cheese in there. I would say that’s about a cup, cup and a half, you can put as much as you want, and stir that so that that will melt down very quickly. I think we’re just about there. Now I want to add a little flavoring to this. Let’s put just a dash of Worcestershire sauce in here. How do you say it, Linda?
- Worcestershire.
- Worcestershire. Worcestershire sauce, okay, I don’t put too much, just a dash. Now some people like the hot flavorings, like I said before, and Tabasco goes great. This would be the time, a couple of dashes of Tabasco. Now we’re gonna thicken this one also, and we can use the same that we used for the potato. It’s basically the same, milk and flour. I’m gonna start out with what I have left here. I thought I would have enough. This isn’t boiling yet, and the rule of thumb is what? It has to be boiling. You see, the cheese has not even fully melted down, not quite yet. But these cream soups, you can do this with cauliflower, I have a wonderful zucchini recipe that we’re gonna be sharing in the days to come for a zucchini soup. Lots of soups, start looking around. Don’t throw out that little bunch of this or a little few of this and a couple of these. Put them in together, put them in a pot, and make a soup, and use either beef or chicken bouillon or canned broth as the basis for it, okay? All right, this is getting there. Potato soup is going to town. Okay, I think that when we get to this point, come on, a little bit more, you can’t rush it. My mother used to take the wings of chicken, and she would make the best chicken soup that you ever tasted just by a couple of little carrots, a little bit of parsley, a little bit of celery, and put those chicken wings in there and just let them cook until the meat would fall off the bones. That’s the most tender meat of the chicken is on those little wings. And then sometimes she’d make homemade noodles or she’d just use the regular packaged noodles. I’ll tell you what, you can’t buy that in a package, you can’t buy that in a can, you can’t buy it in a freezer compartment. The only flavors and the only taste that you’ll get is when you do it yourself, and it’s not too much trouble. Just give it a shot. Okay, we’re gonna go ahead and thicken this, I think we’re there. And we’re gonna be right back to finish the program in just a minute, stay with us now.
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- Well, here we are at the table. We have set it up for a buffet. And we have put our soups. First of all, here’s our potato soup, and we’ve just added a little parsley on top, and I’m gonna add just for some color, you know your presentation is very important, just add a little paprika on the top. Don’t you put that on your potato salad sometimes? Sure, that just adds a little color to it. Then here in the soup tureen is our cream of broccoli au gratin with cheese through it, just nice. That’s the consistency that you’re looking for, just like that. Let me serve some so that I can give you an idea of what you would want to add to this because just by itself it will be fine. You’ve got some crackers there, you put a few crackers. There’s some crusty bread. We’ve prepared a tossed salad that you might serve. Well, today we’re having some iced tea, but you could have a pot of coffee, a hot pot of tea. And what you might wanna do is just sprinkle a few extra little pieces of cheese on the top of this, or if that’s not exactly what you’d want, how about some of this creamy potato soup? And I love fresh dill. See how nice and thick and creamy this is. So when I serve this, I have crumpled, fresh, fried, crumbled bacon that I will sprinkle on the top. You don’t have to, you can just buy bacon bits and do that, or some fresh dill, fresh snipped dill, that if you can get it at your grocer, that’s important. If you can’t, you can use it when it’s in season and dry it and keep it for times just like this. You can also add Tabasco to either of the soups that we talked about today, either of the creamed soups. Let’s add a little bit of bacon along with that dill for the cream of potato. I hope that you’ve enjoyed making our cream soups today. Please be sure to join us the next time because it just wouldn’t be the same without you right here at home. See you then.
- [Announcer] Fresh produce provided by Jordan Banana, wholesalers of fresh fruit and vegetables in Dravosburg, PA. Cookware provided by Wholey’s. Your favorite gourmet deserves the best for less at Wholey Balcony Cookware. Groceries provided by Foodland, where the answer is always yes. Cornerstone Television wishes to thank all our faithful viewers whose consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible.
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