Jacques Pépin's Cozy Potato Leek Soup Recipe | Cooking at Home | KQED

Hi, I'm Jacques Pepin and I'm cooking at home. We make soup at home. Winter, summer, don't make any difference. Cold soup, hot soup. I want to show you how to make a very easy one. I have a quarter of a chicken stock here. Of course, if you don't have a quarter of chicken stock, you can use water and about a tablespoon and a half, two tablespoons of chicken base. So I want to bring that to a boil and cook that with a leek here. Leek is great for soup. As you can see, that leek is a little bit damaged. It's been around in the refrigerator for a while. So I will remove those first two things here, probably up to here. It's no good. Here, a bit of the end here. What you want to do is to cut it in half this way, this way, and that's when you rinse it underwater. You know, all that beautiful light green color, that's what you want. So here it's clean. So now, of course, you could put scallion if you don't have the leek or even onion too, but I like. And as you can see, I use a lot of the green too. I think it's a mistake to remove all of this. I mean, very often a leek may cost up to a dollar a piece. And I've seen people just cutting it up just to keep that part. No, use the whole thing. Okay. So when my stock come to a boil, I'm going to put this in there. I just have to wait for that to come to a boil and boil a couple of minutes. Okay. This has been boiling for like three, four minutes and that's fine. So I'm going to add a little flake to it. And of course those are instant cooking, you know. I have about a cup and a half here, so I don't know whether I need the whole thing. I want to taste it. Oh, no salt. I need salt in there and pepper. Remember the stock that I had was no seasoning. Maybe I put a dash of Tabasco, like a few, a few drop. So you can serve it just as is. But of course, if you want to put a little bit of cream in it, I have some heavy cream. You could put light cream. You can even put milk, you know. And I think that I put here maybe a third of a cup. At that point, that soup can be almost like a vichyssoise, a cold soup, you know. And you can be served this way. I have the chives coming out now. And even with the flowers of the chives, which sometimes I use as a decoration. So that's a very elegant soup. Maybe a couple of chives on top. And maybe those flowers here, which are edible, you know. Tastes a little bit like garlic. And this is it. Instant potato soup for a nice dinner. Happy cooking.