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

Howdy everyone and welcome on that third week of November and today we are going back on the soup making another classic french dish or classic french soup which is the soup au choux said in french or cabbage soup as you can see i've got all the ingredients the pan and we're ready to cook let's go welcome back everyone and today as i just said we're going back on the soup making after the napoleon chicken marango today we're learning how to make the soup au choux and this is the french name this is written soup au choux or in english the cabbage soup it's a very big soup in france a real classic and there was even a movie name after it i'll put the name in the video description what you're going to need for that recipe very simple fresh cabbages and i've got two types of cabbages i'll 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 so let's not waste time and jumping our soup making very easy recipe let's go the recipe of the day is the soup au choux aka in english the cabbage soup now cabbages there's a lot of different ones and today 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 it's called the choux the curly cabbage and it's called i think in english the savoy cabbage and so it's got that specific look and for the rest away from the cabbage like i have shown we're just using some smoked bacon a little bit of onion and a little bit of carrots 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 got your cabbage like this the first thing you're going to 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 of the outer leaf and then 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 going to explode because in english apparently this is called the cannonball cabbage because it looks like a cannonball in there in french it's called a chou cabu or a white cabbage very simple but as you can see it doesn't have the same kind of curls like the other one but it's got plenty of outer leaves so 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 you see this very curly and this is very clean so what i'm going to do i'm going to use half of one and 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 it's really up to you you don't have to use two types but here in any way before you use the cabbage you're going to have to blanch it first okay so when your cabbage is like this you trim off that that bit here and we're just going to cut it in quarters so you get your first half like that and then again very simple and you're going to make four quarters for each cabbage you do the same for the cannonball cabbage as you can see it's very very compact and same thing here i'm going to 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 white cabbage in french and look at the difference 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 savoy 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 that's the difference and now for the blanching so one thing i haven't mentioned yet not to scare people because there's two schools about that as you can see here in the 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 going to 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 going to bring it to the boil with a little bit of rock salt now the reason we are blanching the cabbages 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 sprayed be sprayed with like some pesticides some in some case have been handled by different people there might be little bugs so basically a blanching like that is just going to ensure 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 i've got a little bit of time here to take of the rest of the garnish so just an intonation of carrots one carrot and large carrot cut in quarters one 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 going to go nicely into the soup the water in my cabbages here starts to boil you know it's kind of simmer and that's enough that's enough for the blanching i'm going to take them out and rinse them under cold water my cabbages are done and i'm just going to pour everything in a large kind of sieve next a good rinse cold water and that's going to allow to stop the cooking and even to handle them i still need to cut them so i don't want to burn myself so good rinse under cold water once the cabbage has been rinsed it's cooled down you've 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 that's my personal preference so i'm going to cut all the cabbage and then we're going to move on to the stove we are now ready to really start our soup so i'm using a cast iron and this is a le creuset pan that i really like and you start with a little bit of butter that we're going to start to melt gently on a medium heat once the butter starts to chant like that i'm going to add my carrots and half an onion i've got one of the half onion in quarters and we're just going to mix a little bit to release the aromas just for like 10 or 20 seconds all done and now i'm going to 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 going to take my lovely pork belly here and i'm going to layer the middle of my soup with smoked pork belly and this is smelling beautiful and i just love like anything bacon i love bacon anyway boom to finish i'm adding my onion with the clove so it's as a diffuser and on top of that i'm going to 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 we need to add even more flavor so the cabbage brings some flavor yes but the chicken stock is really the thing that is gonna add a lovely flavor to your soup and like as kofia is saying you can't do anything without stock and that's it if you want you can add a grind of pepper to add some extra flavor on there never add salt at the beginning and remember the smoked pork belly 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 gonna cover and leave it on a simmer for one to one and a half hour and then we'll see the results one hour and 15 minutes have passed and look at this soup i just took it out and i just took some of the take some of the bacon and look at that you get a nice color and the cabbage is still pretty firm look at this so it's gonna be nice and chunky i'm just gonna have a 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 these pieces of pork belly have really diffused 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 croûte 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 bread country style style loaf it's not the freshest but for the soup it's perfect so i'm just gonna cut some pieces here cut them in half and then 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 a little bowl i've got the bread and the croûte i'm talking about are 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 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 uh one or two no no should i put 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 trempe la soup is a french term that says to read to 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 bouillon like we've seen before okay and the way you eat it of course if you have a fork something you can cut a piece of bacon but you will take the piece of bread and eat 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 are ready to try one of these lovely pieces of bread there so i'll just borrow one sorry for the bad manners 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 detach a piece of that and let me try the raw product now we're talking nice chunky pieces of bacon combined with a bit of cabbage let me try the cabbage as well you see what is great is that the cabbage is not overcooked it's still a bit chunky a bit chewy but not as true that you really need to churn it it's 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 so it really feels like a countryside dish it's a beautiful little soup so if you're in a place in america or somewhere in europe where it's getting colder this super sure cabbage soup would be a really nice recipe to try at home it's very simple to but anyway guys there you have it the famous french soup or cabbage soup mainly the old-fashioned way with the pork belly and remember this toasted bread in the oven it's a beautiful recipe that's it for me today i hope you enjoyed this recipe again thanks for the live if you attended the live by the way uh today that was on monday or tuesday you may have seen it it was fun to see and i try to do more of this but as for now i leave you with this beautiful super soon i see you all next time take care bye