Soupe aux Choux ( cabbage and pork soup) : Easy and healthy French soup for winter

howdy everyone and welcome on that third week of Movember and today we are going back on the soup making another classic French dish or classic French soup which is the soup or choux and said in French or cabbage soup as you can see with all the ingredients the pan and we're ready to cook let's go welcome back everyone and three days I just said we're going back on the soup making after the Napoleon chicken Marengo today we're learning how to make the soup or shoe and this is the French name is written soup or shoe or in English the cabbage soup it's a very big soup in front of a real classic and it was even a movie named after it out put the name in the video description what you're gonna need for that recipe very simple fresh cabbages and I've got two types of cabbages I will explain why later carrots onion smoked bacon bread I love bread and of course I'm using a cast-iron pan to have that soup that's going to be cooking for one or two hours and so let's not waste time and jumping how soup making very easy recipe let's go the recipe of the day is the soup or shoe okay in English the cabbage soup now cabbages there's a lot of different ones and to them I'm just going to show you the difference I think the main difference on one hand you've got this one which is very curly in French and it's called the shoe frizzy the curly cabbage and it's called a thing in English the savoy cabbage and so it is good that that specific look and for the rest away from the cabbage like I've shown you just use some smoked bacon a little bit of onion and little bit of carrot a little bit I'm stressing out because a lot of recipes from the you know today's world tends to use all kinds of vegetables but for me a cabbage soup has to be mainly cabbages so when you get your cabbage like this the first thing you're gonna do is to trim off you know all these ugly leaves and discard them on another thing so we're going to do this first trim off all the outer leaf and as we've got your cabbage I'll show you the other one Wow would you look at this one you see how it looks like it's facing you like it's gonna explode because in English apparently this is called a cannonball cabbage because it looks like a cannonball in there in French is called the shoe kibou or white cabbage very simple and but as you can see doesn't have the same kind of curls like the other one but a good plenty of other leaves the same thing here when you prepare your cabbage for the soup you just discard all of these outer leaves and reserve them for something else so we go really deep inside and we discard the leaves once the outer leaves are removed you can then rinse your cabbage or clean it under clear water running water and this is what you get you can clearly see the difference between here the cannonball or white cabbage in French and here the curly cabbage or savoy cabbage in English it is very curly and is very clean so what I'm gonna do I'm gonna use half of one and a half of the other just to mix them and mix the flavors a little bit now I said I use the two types of cabbage but at home feel free to use whatever type you like and it's really up to you you don't have to use too tight but here in anyway before you use the cabbage you're gonna have to blanch it first okay so when your cabbage is like this you trim off that that bit here and we're just gonna cut it in quarters so you get your first half like that and then again very simple and you're gonna make four quarters for each cabbage these are the same for the Cannonball cabbage as you can see and it's very very compact and same thing here I'm gonna cut this as well all my cabbages are cut and now you can clearly see the difference between the curly cabbage or the savoy cabbage also called the green cabbage as you can see here against the Cannonball or sugar view of white cabbage Kubla in French and look at the difference and cabbages they are not all the same so if someone asks you what is the difference or do you know the savoy cabbage yes the Szabo is the curly one look at this all these curls in here the white cabbage and this is usually used for coleslaw much more compact as a difference and now for the blanching so one thing I haven't mentioned yet not to scare people because there to schools about that as you can see here in a background you have to use usually a clear chicken stock to make that soup it's not a vegetarian soup and there's also smoked pork belly into it but some people like to make it with water so I've made a chicken stock I've got a video on it and this is what I'm gonna use but you can use water for the blanching you start in cold water you put your quarters of cabbage in the water and we're just gonna bring it to the boil with a little bit of rock salt and the reason we are blanching the cabbage is because I'm sure some of you may already wonder why well it's more for an extra cleaning if you wish because you know the cabbage they may have spread be sprayed with like some pesticides some in some case have been handled by different people than my did little bugs so basically a blanching like that is you just going to insure your cabbage is nice and tender easy to work with and really really clean before we put it in our soup now that my cabbage is blanching a but a little bit of time here and to take off the rest of the gun is to just an international carrots 1 carrot a large carrot cut in quarters 1 onion cut in half and I've put some cloves in there and I've got my smoked pork belly that I've cut and roughly this kind of size and this type of thickness and that's gonna go nicely into the soup the water in my cabbage is here starts to boil you know it's kind of simmer and that's enough that you know for the blanching I'm going to take them out and rinse them under cold water okay we're done and I'm just gonna pour everything in a large kind of sieve next the good rinse cold water and that's going to allow to stop the cooking and even to handle them as you need to cut them so I don't want to burn myself some good rains on the cold water once the cabbage has been range is cool down you got that hard section here that you can very simply remove now with a knife and discard and for the rest it is up to you to cut the cabbage in whatever way I like to still keep a little bit of thickness in there not to have just tiny little portions so this is the types of strings I'm doing so having a closer look this is how wide I leave the pieces if you want you can cut them in half or make them smaller it's really up to you and that's my personal preference so I'm gonna cut all the cabbage and then we're gonna move on to the stove we are now ready to really start our soup so I'm using a cast iron and it's a look who's a partner that I really like and you start with a little bit of butter that we're gonna start to melt gently on a medium heat once the butter start to chant like that I'm gonna add my carrots and half an onion I've got one of the half onion in quarters and which is going to mix a little bit to release the aroma just for like 10 or 20 seconds all done and now I'm gonna start by adding half of my cabbage so one cabbage and the equivalent of one cabbage is enough for about two liters of water usually so half of it and then give it a good stir next I'm gonna take my lovely pork belly here and I'm gonna layer the middle of my soup with smoked pork belly and this is smelling beautiful and I just love like anything bacon anyway boom to finish I'm adding my onion with the cloves as a diffuser and on top of that I'm gonna add the rest of my cabbage okay so we've got a nice big pot of cabbage and smoked pork belly now that we have this now we need to add even more flavor so the cabbage bring some flavor yes but the chicken stock is really the thing that is gonna add a lovely flavor to your soup and like Escoffier saying and you can't do anything without stock and that's it if you want you can add a grind of pepper and to add some extra flavor on there never add salt at the beginning and remember the smoked Bob is salty no salt when you make a soup if you need to make salt or add salt sorry at the end only so when this is done we're going to cover and leave it on a simmer for one to one-and-a-half hour and I'll go see the results one hour and 15 minutes have passed and look at this super just took it out and I just took some of the tech some of the bacon and look at that they get a nice color and the cabbage is still pretty firm look at this now so it's gonna be nice and chunky I'm just gonna have a taste of that of that soup looks lovely nice and salty but you see I didn't add salt and it's perfect oh that smokiness I think all the porkiness of the species of pork belly have Reedy fused through the soup and it's amazing how it goes really really well with cabbage and it really tastes just like a cabbage soup and not like a vegetable soup with cabbage big difference okay so let's serve the soup but before we do so there's one more step that needs to happen and that is to make what we call the coot pieces of bread that are often toasted that are usually served on top of the soup let's do that and now for the bread so I've got here nice piece of chunky Breda country style style loaf ants not the freshest but for the soup it's perfect so I'm just gonna cut some pieces here cut them in half and that's we're gonna roast them in the oven chunky and here we are ladies and gentlemen as you can see here I've got the soup up the little bowl I've got the bread and the coot I'm talking about all these things you see they're like just often roasted no oil in there I think I've burned them a little bit but in any way I'll try to just pour some soup and the way it's meant to be done so if if I'm making a mess so the important is to have these chunky pieces of cabbage that you want all right then maybe let's try to add some some bacon how many pieces do we want one not soprano shot with two okay put two in there okay so basically that's it and then the old-fashioned way usually it says that you need to put these breads and let them kind of soak in the juice of the soup so I'm just gonna put two here for the demonstration and Tom pea soup is a French term that says to reach you soak the bread in the soup and that was the whole purpose in the Middle Ages they were only having pieces of bread soaked in boo-yan like we've seen before okay and the way you eat it of course if you have a folks and we can cut a piece of bacon but you will take the piece of bread and then it so if you are cheeky like me you can add a little bit of cheese on top this is my little addition and now basically I think we're ready to try one of these lovely pieces of bread there so just borrow one sorry for the bad manners mmm the bread is really nice but the cheese is lovely now really honestly the taste of the cabbage with the smokiness it will be better even you know what if you'd attach a piece of death let me try the raw product now now we're talking nice chunky pieces of bacon combined with a bit of cabbage let me try the cabbage slaw wysiwyg right is that the cabbage is not overcooked it's still a bit chunky a bit chewy but not as true that you will need to turn it it is kind of dissolved as you eat it and blend beautifully with the other ingredients I think we can say that this soup was a success let me take a bit more mm-hmm so it really feels like a contrary side dish it's a beautiful little soup so if you're in a place in America or somewhere in Europe was getting colder this super shuo cabbage soup would be a really nice recipe to try at home it's very simple to make but anyway guys there you have it the famous French soup or shoe or cabbage soup mainly the old-fashioned way with the pork belly and remember these toasted bread in the oven it's a beautiful recipe but is it for me today I hope you enjoyed this recipe again thanks for the life if you attended the live by the way today that was on Monday or to that you may have seen it it was fun to see all and I try to do more of this but as funny I leave you this beautiful super chic as you all next time take care [Music]

Channel: French Cooking Academy

Views: 385,347

Keywords: french cuisine, french food, french recipes, French Cooking Academy, cabbage soup recipes, french cabbage soup, soupe au choux, soupe au choux recipe, french soup recipe, cabbage and bacon soup, french comfort soup, cabbage and pork soup, Easy and healthy French soup for winter

Id: kbDjjS6H9cM

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 23 2018