8 Easy Ways To Boost Your Soup - with Centrepoint's The Big Broth*

How many times have you looked at a bowl of soup and thought that it’s actually going to save your life? Perhaps when you’ve been poorly and through the piles of tissues and cloud of germs a loved one emerges carrying a bowl of steaming nourishment. Or maybe when out on a country walk you get stuck in a downpour and, miserable and shivering, you see the orange light of a cosy café with condensation on the windows and a soup of the day. Even days when all that’s left in the fridge is odds and sods you will often be able to whizz them together into a bowl of something delicious and comforting.

But a soup can also be lifesaving in a much more literal way for the homeless in the UK and around the world. Centrepoint* is the UK youth homelessness charity and supports over 9,000 homeless young people a year. As is so often the case with adult homelessness, youth homelessness has many complex factors and causes: Centrepoint works with young people leaving care, escaping gang culture, refugees, people with mental and physical health problems and those running from abuse at home. Centrepoint does more than provide a bed. They work to tackle the causes of an individual’s homelessness by providing health support, teaching life skills and getting them back into education, training and employment.

So where exactly does soup come into this?! The Big Broth is Centrepoint’s new campaign to raise awareness and funds for their life-changing work. We’re not asking you to open your purse, but open up your kitchen cabinets and get cooking! Most of us have a signature soup recipe that our families agree is the best ever – Centrepoint want you to share it with them and have the chance of it going into production.Submit your recipe on The Big Broth site, and from there it will be tested and judged by a panel of celebrity chefs including Aldo Zilli and Thomasina Miers. If yours is the winning soup, it will be put into production by Yorkshire Provender and sold in Waitrose, with 20p from each sale going to Centrepoint.

The deadline to submit your soup recipe is Saturday 31st March, so get yourself over to The Big Broth website!

8 Ways To Boost Your Broth

To help you make your recipe the best it can be, I’ve pulled together some top chef tips that will take your broths to the next level. Most of you know that my other half is a chef, so these are a mix of his professional expertise and my homemade experiments (but they’re mostly his 😉).

Your main ingredient should be 95% of all the ingredients. This sounds like a weird thing to say, but how often do you find a tomato soup recipe where you have to use onions, celery, peppers and carrots before you even look at a tomato? If you want a soup to taste of a certain ingredient, it needs to be made from that ingredient
Loosen with milk not water. We all get to that point where we’ve made a soup that could probably stand up in stiff peaks it’s so thick (butternut squash, I’m looking at you here). Most often we ass water or stock to loosen up our purees and make them more soup-like, but the chef tip here is to use milk instead. Water will dilute the flavour and unbind the ingredients; milk adds a creaminess and keeps the elements bound together.
When making a green soup pre-blanch and freeze your green elements, rather than go straight from pan to blender. Add the frozen greens when blending and it will cool down the soup and, crucially, keep a vibrant colour
Season during the blend, not after, and continually taste

If your soup is too rich or ‘claggy’ in the mouth (we all know that feeling), add lemon juice. Lemon juice is your secret weapon in the kitchen; it will lift virtually anything
Freshness of the ingredients is the main thing – Dan expects his chefs to complete a soup from pan to bowl in under 15 minutes! The less time you can spend on the ingredient, the more it will retain its natural goodness, so set a timer for your soup making
If you’re using spices in your soup, chill it before serving. The cold brings out the flavour of the spices and will make the flavours pop
When adding your jazzy elements on top, go for texture. Seeds are a quick and easy option, but try using your main ingredient in a new way too – parsnip crisps, caramelised cauliflower florets, chicken skin