Beef Soup

A meal without soup is only half the job, my grandfather always said. And soup was automatically meat soup. A lot has changed since then, but what has remained is the wonderfully cozy feeling when you come home from the cold in winter and a plate of steaming ‘Fritatten’ (cut crepes) soup is waiting for you. This is heaven.

Soup, bouillon, consommé, broth, stock – all related and yet not the same. A clear soup or broth are basically the same thing. Translated into French, you then get a bouillon. If you then clarify the whole thing with an egg white and reduce the liquid, you end up with the consommé. And if you cook that with a second portion of meat, you end up with the consommé double.

A stock is a twin to soup, but is cooked with the intention of serving as a base for sauces. In concrete terms, this means that the meat and bones are boiled for hours for a stock.

Interesting

There’s only one king of cooked beef, and that’s Ewald Plachutta. With him, however, the focus is more on the cooked meat and not so much on the soup, which is more of a by-product. Tafelspitz, Tafelstück, white Scherzel, lean chisel, Kavalierstück. If you want to know exactly, you have to deal with the way beef is cut in Vienna.[1]

Important Questions

What kind of meat?
Definitely beef, if possible, with long fibers and lots of connective tissue, fat and tendons. That gives a lot of flavors! In Vienna, for example, one looks for a Scherzl or a Meisl, in Germany more for a Querrippe (prime rib) or Dünnung (skirt steak) .

A separate category are tail parts, which then result in the famous oxtail soup.

Do you need bones?
Marrowbones are best. The bone marrow brings a wonderful note to the soup. In contrast, there are sandy bones that come from joints. A mixture of both is often used for soup.

When to add salt?
very important: Salt comes at the very end, unless you want to eat the meat. Then it’s already salted at the beginning.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener_Teilung

Ingredients

4-6 servings

– 500 g beef (soup meat)
– 500 g beef bones (2/3 marrow bones, 1/3 sandy bones)
– 1 onion
– 250 g soup vegetables (carrots, turnips, celery, leeks, lovage, parsley)
– Spices: peppercorns and, to taste, a pinch of  cloves, garlic
– Salt (as a guideline 10 g per liter)
– 3.5L of water

Refining

Increasing the meat/bone to water ratio in favor of the meat will make the soup stronger. Of course, all sorts of mushrooms that can be cooked with the soup vegetables and are suitable as an umami booster. A small dash of sherry completes the soup. But beware! Don’t use too much sherry or mushrooms.

CULINAMUS

For our Culinamus soup we follow the recipe pretty closely. The meat is not meant to be eaten, we like to use a well-infused piece of soup meat.

Vorbereitung

15 minutes

– Halve the onion and brown it properly in a frying pan on aluminum foil (so that the pan does not suffer).
– Wash meat and bones (lukewarm or cold)
– Wash and cut the vegetables into pieces

Cooking

2 1/2 hours
– Boil the bones with 3.5 liters of water. add meat.
– Skim off the foam that rises with a slotted spoon.
– Add the onion and spices and cook gently for 1 ½ hours (without the lid).
– Add the vegetables and cook for another 30 minutes.
– Salt (approx. 10 g per liter) if the soup is to be used directly and drain. Otherwise wait with the salt.

If you want to clarify the soup, you have to let it cool down first. Preferably overnight. Mix in one egg white per liter of liquid and mix well. Then heat and remove the gray foam (the hardened egg white). Strain the soup through a fine-mesh sieve and enjoy.

If you then want to be in the premier class, take the cold soup and add 700 g of minced beef mixed with 2 egg whites. Boil slowly and stir regularly (be careful, the meat can burn). Simmer briefly, then switch off and let steep for about 15 minutes. Remove the meat with a slotted spoon. Finally, use a filter cloth to remove the last suspended matter from the consommé. This works best if you scoop the soup and don’t pour it over.

And then...?

A pleasure with Fritatten (cut crepes) and chives. As far as the wine is concerned, I would rather orientate myself on the ‘after’. If the soup is ‘expanded’ to a traditional Viennese soup pot, a beer will taste great with it, a fine light Ottkringer is a hit! Or a light white wine, a Gemischter Satz from Fuhrgasslhuber.

CULINAMUS!

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