The Daily Soup Cookbook

`Daily Soup' is the name of a New York City chain of restaurants that serve only soup. This book presents the one hundred best recipes out of the five hundred soups the author / chef / owners have developed at the restaurants. This description alone promises a first class collection. I began reading the book with great expectations about the quality of the recipes.One aspect of the recipes in this book is that since `Daily Soup' serves only soup, every recipe must be robust enough to be a full meal. The authors state this plainly in the beginning of the book. If you need a light soup, look to Barbara Kafka's `Soup, A Way of Life' or James Peterson's `Splendid Soups'.Early in the book, it became clear to me that the authors truly have fun with their soups and succeed in communicating that sense of fun to you, dear reader. This is a rare commodity in culinary writing which you find as a rare spice to a few writers such as Julia Child and as a truly hot ingredient in the works of Alton Brown and Wayne Harley Brachman. This gave me even greater expectations for the book. The good humor appears in most general instructions, sidebars, headnotes, and selected chapters devoted entirely to whimsy such as the best soups to eat to various movies and the best musical accompaniment for some soups.The introductory chapter(s) including a section entitled `Some Things to Remember' are pure gold in the world of advice about soup. The most interesting advice regarded temperature in general and freezing soups in particular. Another obvious but often forgotten fact about temperature is that every time an ingredient is added to a heated pot of soup or stock, the temperature will drop a bit, so one's figuring about how long the cooking will take and what must be done to keep the food a temperature which will kill any roaming bacteria who get the notion to join the party.The authors organize their recipes in a sensible fashion, by primary ingredient. This is doubly sensible in their case in that almost every soup is hearty enough to satisfy one as a full meal should. Therefore, there are no broths and few soups with a small number of ingredients. The authors augment their classification by ingredient with one or more additional classifiers above the name of the soup. These classifiers include `vegetarian', `spicy', `dairy free', `vegetarian', and `low fat'. The principle ingredients, being recipe chapter names, are Vegetable; Tomato; Rice; Grain, Pasta, and Bread; Corn; Potato; Bean; Chili; Lentil and Pea; Nut; Coconut; Cheese; and Fruit. To these are added chapters on Roux based soups such as the gumbos and `Really Delicious Soups That Didn't Fit Into Any Chapter'. This chapter contains seven recipes. The perfect example of this is Bouillabaisse.Bouillabaisse is also a perfect example of the fact that the authors are not standing on custom in the recipes they use. I was surprised to find them using a vegetable stock in the Bouillabaisse when a recent Tyler Florence sh

I bought this book after reading some of the reviews here and I have to agree with them. I made the salmon chowder and senegalese peanut soup, and they tasted like something from a gourmet restaurant. I have never made such perfect soups. However, these are very expensive and time-consuming recipes. If you follow them exactly, you'll get excellent soup. You'll also spend lots of money on ingredients and about two hours chopping, chopping, chopping to make the vegetable stock, then more chopping to make the actual soup. I nearly lost my mind (and about 35 minutes) grinding a pound of salted peanuts into a paste with a blender, only to realize: Couldn't I have achieved this by buying natural, unsugared peanut butter? Couldn't I have purchased that vegetable stock from Imagine Foods? (Maybe not. After the aforementioned hours of chopping, you might not want to risk [messing] up the whole dish with a substitution. And when you need 12 cups of stock, buying it makes it even more expensive).Anyway, I would recommend this book to a friend. Especially a rich, single friend.

Last night I cooked the "Cream of Lentil" soup. Although initially afraid that this wouldn't be the meal that some of the other soups are (e.g., Senegalese Peanut), I was pleasantly surprised at how good this dish also turned out to be.I rated this cookbook "5 stars" due to the following:1. excellent recipes for tremendous meals;2. easy-to-follow instructions (a must for "cooks" like me);3. just enough background on the dish "genre" (e.g., vegetarian, cheese, etc.) to make you comfortable to prepare a soup you've never made before;4. hints/suggestions about storage of basic stocks;5. easy-to-read format (i.e., layout of book is clear and uncluttered).

I went to Daily Soup at Union Square in NY at least 2 or 3 times a week from when they opened until they closed. Terrible loss but when I came upon this book at a bookstore right near where the store used to be and flipped through it, I couldn't believe it -- sort of like that Seinfeld when the Soup Nazi's recipes are found stashed in the dresser (wish THIS were true -- his soups are amazing, too). Anyway, bought it, made the Poblano Corn Chowder, and it worked. Truly one of the best soups I've ever had and a dead ringer for the one I used to get all the time from their store. The other recipes are pretty great, too. Lots of the standards but plenty of imaginative ones, as well. Only wish I had their recipe for salmon with dill!. This is the best soup cookbook I've got with a wide range of recipes for whatever mood you're in. Gotta buy it.

I don't know about you, but I can eat soup morning, noon, and night -- in the summer, spring, fall and winter! To me, soup makes me feel better, warms us my house and my soul. Maybe it reminds me of being a kid or of my grandmother -- either way I think it has the same effect on everyone! (PS: Did you know that "lentil soup dates back to 8,000 BC"?) Anyway, In the How to Use this Book section, you will learn Good Cooking Requirements, Ingredient Familiarization, Organization, Taste, Time, and most importantly -- Love! (PS: Did you know that "Hands are for whenever tools don't work; Fingers are for whenever hands don't work; and as far as your Tongue is concerned -- if the soup doesn't touch your tongue often enough, it's unloved!") The Daily Soup Cookbook starts off with recipes containing veggies, tomatoes, and rice, then goes on to grains, pasta, bread, corn, potatos, the very thoughtful -- music recommendations while cooking your soup, beans, chili, another thoughtful entry -- movies to rent while eating your soup, lentils and peas, nuts, coconuts, cheese, a periodic table of soups (a must see, I could never explain it), fruit, the very clever -- Soup Personals (another must see), roux (pronounced roo), and finally, Really Delicious Soups that Didn't Fit into Any Chapter! My favorite parts of the book include: Things to do with Leftover Soup (very helpful for families), Baby Names for the New Milliennium (i.e., Girls: Saffron, Pumpkin; Boys: Stew, Penne, and the best -- Art E. Choke); and of course, the fact that this all started in a small East Village, NY kitchen. For an East Coast chick like myself -- this book is like a warm, aromatic bowl of soup!