We finally polished off the turkey from thursday. Just a few gross dried out bits and bones are left. The time has come to make turkey soup. I’ve never made turkey soup before, so I was wondering if there are any tricks I should be aware of.
So far the ingredients are:
turkey bones
1 onion
6 radishes
5 small halepeno peppers
1 tablespoon marmite (I don’t know why it just sounded good)
1 can cream of mushroom soup (I figured it wouldn’t hurt and otherwise it was going to waste since it was actually an opened large can)
1 1/2 gallons water
I boiled it to get it going, but now its simmering and covered.
That’s the fun part about soup - there’s no One True Recipe That Thou Shall Follow.
If you like it, fantastic. Personally, I’d never put radishes or peppers into soup. <g>
My usual bird soup (it works with either turkey or chicken) is the turkey carcass (or a pile of chicken parts) in the big pot with water to cover, a diced onion or two, a spoonful of minced garlic, diced celery, bay leaf, a sliced carrot. Simmer for a few hours, poking occasionally to help the skeleton break up. Soup in under an hour is pretty much pointless as it’s not enough time to extract the goods from the bones.
The fun part is to weed out the bones from the meaty bits (and the veggies). This gets to be messy and a bit time-consuming. If you want broth, you can just pour it through a strainer, which is a lot faster, but isn’t the point of making soup to get all of that meat?
For turkey soup, a dollop of tomato paste near the end will give it some more “heft” and body - not too much though, or you’ll taste tomato. This doesn’t work out as well in chicken soup. For chicken soup, squeeze in a lemon or two’s worth of juice.
Actually, I think I read here that I should simmer it a realy long time, so I was assuming that I would do it overnight. Thanks for the garlic suggestion though, I had forgotten that I had garlic in the fridge. I have some extra celery too, so I will get that in shortly. I don’t have any tomato paste lying around, so I’ll have to do without. I just tasted it though and it’s pretty good. It’s not nearly as spicy as I would have predicted. It’s a little spicy, but realy quite modest. I strongly recomend trying the halepeno peppers. The cream of mushroom soup though is “the bomb” here.
I don’t know how into picking the meat off the bones I’m going to be. Maybe I’ll cheat and buy some cheap poultry to stick in there later.
I must admit MadTheSwine, I am not quite sure what you are saying. When I get done, I will have a turkey broth with possibly some meat to go into soup. It’s definitely nothing I could put into a tortilla.
Four hours should be plenty. If you want to reduce it, you can boil it longer (with the lid off). You might want to add a bouquet garni, but use cheesecloth, not “a bag”, like the link says.
FYI, I was newbie soup maker last year-- here’s my similar thread, with lots of good advice.
I made my turkey soup yesterday (well, lots of stock, but some of it became soup) and as I was digging through cabinets to see what might be good and ran across some sundried tomatoes and tossed three in. That really added just a little more depth - though I’d never made turkey soup before, so it might not be that big of a difference.
I recently read (though I couldn’t tell you where) that adding vinegar or lemon juice to a stock will help move the calcium from the bones into the stock.
My basic stock recipe is bones and meat from whatever, onion, carrot, and celery. Then I add other ingredients depending on what I’ve got in the fridge that seems appropriate. Last night I made a lovely beef soup with onion, carrot, celery, potato, turnip, and cabbage. When I was ready to serve it, I added a tiny can of V8, which gives a good rich flavor and color. It also adds a bit of vitamins.
When we have leftover turkey, we will frequently have turkey pot pie and/or turkey and dumplings. And we will have mooching kitties, too.
The kitties have been noticably freindlier as long as this has been cooking. Yes, it is still cooking, and like I said, I intend to cook it overnight. Once I set out to do something…
I make stock (now simmering for hours instead of boiling, as I’ve learned here). I simmer everything left over from the bird, but first I pull off all the good bits of meat, white and dark, and set those aside.
I put lots of celery and onions in there, kosher salt, fresh ground pepper, a touch of garlic, then a touch more. I also put in poultry seasoning, which I think is mostly sage.
You can add some other veggies, too, like carrots and chunks of potato.
I went home with the roasted carcass (there’s still tons of meat on) from Turkey Day and plan to strip and cook that sucker tonight according to a recipe that requires onion, carrot, and garlic. (Well, it also requires celery but I hate the stuff with a passion) Plus a sachet of herbs and stuff.
We’ll see how it turns out - the carcass’s been resting in the fridge and the freezer until I could get the timing right to have 3-4 hours free to simmer and not burn down the house. :eek:
This will be my first time making stock, and I’m clinging very tightly to the idea that there’s no one true way to make soup for reassurance’s sake.
Turkey carcass and meat simmered with water, carrot, onion,and celery. Salt and pepper to taste. Shred the remaining turkey fom the carcass into the stock, add a package of dry wide egg noodles.Simmer til ready, serve.
You might try breaking a clean rib of celery into two or three pieces. It will flavor the stalk a bit and be easy to take out. I like raw celery, but don’t really care for too much celery in the soup. However, my husband and daughter like it, so mostly I put some in.
I have learned to strip the meat off the carcass first. There will still be bits and pieces that are not feasible to remove, and that will be plenty to flavor the stock. However, if poultry meat is left in the stock too long, it becomes powdery and flavorless, so after the stock is done, I add in some meat.
After the homemade soup is consumed, Progresso makes a pretty decent turkey and noodle canned soup.
My general rule is to make the stock first - so boil up the bones with any of the vegetables you want to use as flavouring and will possibly pick out to blend smooth later. Don’t add things like Marmite or mushroom soup until you have a strained broth, otherwise you’re wasting some of it that soaks into or coats the bones and other bits you’ll throw out.