Many of the Italian soups are pureed, in all kinds of combinations--spinach and potato, squash and carrot, lentil and potato. There are also all kinds of minestrone, bags of veggies cut up into small pieces, often beefed up with grains or pasta.
A few days ago I bought a bag of frozen vegetable minestrone, a combination of carrots, beans, tomatoes, squash, potatoes, some dozen vegetables in all. How wonderful not to have to do all that chopping, I thought, especially since we are operating in a minimalist kitchen at the moment.
The soup was a cheap supermarket brand, so perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised that it was pretty disappointing. The vegetables tasted flat, as though they'd died before they were frozen. It tasted the way I imagine food in an Italian prison does. Even adding a bouillon cube didn't help.
Yesterday, ever hopeful, I tried one of the pureed versions. The label promises "Vegetable Lightness" and notes that this soup has 50 percent fewer calories than the average soup made by this company. But what appealed to me was the idea of an all-vegetable soup, not the calorie savings, as I hope the salami and bread in the picture prove.
The bag felt a little lumpy; I thought maybe the soup had thawed and then refrozen at some point. But when I opened it I discovered a mass of what looked like little...well, what? ginger cookies? frozen turds?
They seemed most un-soup-like, in any event. But when heat was applied they melted into a brown puree very much like the one depicted on the label.
Unfortunately, "Lightness" apparently required a total absence of salt and, once again, a minimal amount of flavor. This soup, too, was a dud. (And considerably less attractive, visually, than the zombie minestrone.)
Of sociological interest, though, is what seems to be an Italian predilection for freezing things in little nuggets. The freezer case also features bags full of cubetti of chopped spinach, chopped chard, chopped mushrooms, and other items that I presume cooks want smalls amount of to put into a pasta filling or a sauce. This actually seems pretty smart. Do we do that in the States, and I just haven't noticed because I never buy frozen food at home?
Tonight, while waiting for our dinner to cook, I chopped up a mess of fresh vegetables (romano beans, peppers, carrots, leeks, mushrooms, celery), topped it all off with some tomato puree, water, and a couple of "classico"-flavored bouillon cubes, and made myself a big pot of non-frozen vegetable soup. It tastes really good, if I do say so myself.
2 comments:
SOO interesting about the food frozen in little pieces/shapes, so the cook can pick out one or two or three or howevermany to use! I do that with lemons, which I whirr up in the Vitamix, skins and all. Then freeze into cubes, put in a bag, and unthaw as needed. I freeze a LOT of things during the summer. I whir up mountains of greens in the food processor and put them (dry, not cooked) into tall no-shoulder canning jars, with plastic (non BPA but probably other horrible plastic ingredients) and freeze them. I also make big batches of vegetable soup all year round but especially in the winter, and freeze them. I buy as much kabocha "Sunshine" squash as I can find, cook it, and freeze it....
The sight of those nuggets puts me off my food.
Is the produce local at least?
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