Salt shock for diet soups!! Soup recipies anyone??

clafairy1984

OMG!! I have been having a weight watchers soup for lunch at work,thinking that as theyre low calorie theyre healthy, and I have just realised how much salt is in them. It's shocking. As a result I am planning to start making my own. Anyone have any good soup recipes ?

leftcoastscott

AIUI, dietary salt isn't currently thought to be a major problem if you're otherwise healthy - it's no longer thought to be as simple as "too much salt = bad." Kind of the same way the thinking around dietary cholesterol has been evolving over the last decade or two.

At any rate, the secret to most great soups is a great stock. If you have an appropriate stock on hand, whipping up a delicious soup is pretty straightforward. If you don't, you're pretty much out of luck. Stocks are simple to make, but usually time consuming - you can whip up a quality fish stock in under an hour if you have fish bones on hand, but vegetable and chicken stocks are a multi-hour commitment, and beef stocks are an all-day affair. The good news is that there are commercially available flavour bases that are almost as good as from-scratch stocks, great for making soups. The bad news is that they usually contain a ton of salt.

dopeysmelly

Make your own.

It's the same for any prepared food. They cater for both the majority of tastes (which prefer salty food) and to make margins (which means lower quality ingredients) and to keep shelf life (another reason for salt and other preservatives).

I make a lot of soup. I make it in batches when I have the time and ingredients and freeze it in portions. I agree good stock is the base, but I generally use Better than Bouillon lower sodium paste gunk when I don't have time or ingredients and it still comes out way lower in sodium and tastes pretty good.

kitsteroo

Thanksgiving/Christmas is the best time to make stock, too. Just get a stockpot, fill it with water, and literally all veg/meat food scraps go into the pot. Carrot ends, onion skins, onion ends, garlic peelings, celery trimmings, turkey bones, ham bones, potato trimmings, left over herb stems, you name it. You're cooking all day anyway and instead of 1000 trips to the trash can, you have a convenient way to re-use your scraps and your leftovers. You hardly even have to go out of your way! I do it every year, and it's the only time I do it, really. The stock can be frozen for long-term storage or canned if you want to go through the trouble. I like to freeze it in ice trays and dump the cubes into ziplock bags for easy storage and ease of use. Just grab a handful and pop 'em into a skillet to add flavor to meat or whatever, or dump a bunch into a crockpot for a soup base.

1948sixty

Fall is my favorite time for butternut squash soup...a "cream" soup without any cream. Saute yellow onion, celery, cubed butternut squash, celery and even toss in some cauliflower. Add some sow sodium chicken broth. Season with pepper, dried thyme, agave nectar, garam masala curry. Once veggies are softened, I turn off stove and use my immersion blender to puree or can be done in batches in a blender.