Soup at a cocktail party? Sure, if you set up a buffet-style soup station.
Transcript
As a chef, soup is always on my menu, whether it’s a warm soup in the cooler months or a cool soup in a hotter months. Now, it may seem impractical to serve soup at your cocktail party but I have come up with a solution to do just that and it’s called a soup station. It’s really easy to assemble. First you got to want to cover your table with some protective coating and plastic bags work great for this. Then cover it with some linens and you got to want to decorate it. A great way to simply decorate your table is by using things that are already ingredients in your soup. Now I’ve made a butter nut squash soup so I’ve choose to decorate the table with all kinds of all decorations, squashes and pumpkins. Now if I was doing a spot show I might choose to decorate with some tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, garlic. Now important when you’re serving soup, you want to keep in mind temperature. So if you’re serving cold soup you want to keep it cold, if you’re serving hot soup you want to keep it hot. So a temperature control vessel is always best. Now hot soup I highly recommend putting out mugs or cups that have handles so your guests are not burning their fingers. Also, make sure that the ladle is not too wide, so that it’s easily poured into the cup. So here we go, now let’s talk about the fun of a soup station, all the garnishes. I generally will stick with about four or five. But this is a great opportunity for the guests to customize their own soup. In here I have some sour cream, a little dollop with that, I have some candid nuts, and keep in mind you want to put out garnishes that makes sense for the soup you’re serving. So if this is a Gazpacho, I might put out some salsa, sour cream, guacamole, a little bit of nuts on here, some chives, and I even have a small sprinkling of some cumin and paprika. And a great tip is instead of putting out spoons for your guest make up a bread basket, all different kinds of breads. You can have pumpernickel, baggetts, bread sticks but this is in a lieu of spoons. So want to make sure that you cut the bread to fit the size of the cup or mug, cheers to soup.