NTC 4: Turkishish red lentil soup
# NTC 4: Turkishish red lentil soup
Hello again, It's Pete Hindle jumping on that email newsletter bandwagon. Last week I left it to the very last moment to write a recipe, and so for this week I picked something simple, something easy to write up. And then I left it for ages and now I am writing it up at the last minute. Arghh.
This week is a recipe for tomato and lentil soup. It’s a very basic soup, that can be made in fifteen minutes, so it’s good for those times when you just need to make some food quickly. I like to make a big pot of it and then use if for a few different meals, even turning it into a pasta sauce. The secret is throwing lots of different toppings on it, so it always tastes different:
Topping suggestions:
Sesame seeds!
Parsley!
Coriander!
Basil leaves!
Feta cheese!
Lemon juice!
Hard cheese!
Mango chutney!
Bread!
Hummus!
You can put anything you want on top of this soup. It comes from the Turkish tradition, and is a modified version of a Turkish soup I had at the famous Sila restaurant in Linz. Sila is a cross between a bakery and a restaurant, serving both the Turkish community and the hungover students that live in the area. I don’t get there so much as I am neither a drinker nor Turkish, but on the few times I have made it to Sila the soup has been great.
This recipe isn’t that hangover-saving soup, so it’s Turkish-ish soup. It’s a bit like Sila’s lentil soup, but I’m pretty sure it’s missing some essential Turkish thing that I don’t know about. And that’s before I start putting things into the soup, because I love eating this soup with a big chunk of bread covered in marmite, an English spread which tastes so horrible only English people want to eat it.
Ingredients:
olive oil
onion
salt
can of chopped tomatoes
water
red lentils
The big secret
There’s one important thing to make this simple soup taste amazing: you have to cook the onions so much that you caramelise the sugars in the body of the onion. This is a great tip for pretty much any soup, but because this soup is so simple, the only thing to worry about is getting the onions right. Some people add a bit of sugar to tomatoes when they cook, because they thing tomatoes by themselves are too acidic, so maybe the sweetness of the onions does that in this recipe; I’m not sure.
What I am sure about is that you have to cook these onions like you hate them. Just straight-up murder these onions. They should go from white, to beige, to just before brown. A little bit of salt helps to soften the onions at this stage.
When the onions are looking and smelling good, add the can of tomatoes on top and stir. Then add some more water until the tomatoes look thinner. Then add some lentils, stir, and bring it to the boil.
Note that I’m not saying how much, because this recipe is something I do by eye. Sometimes I add too many lentils and get a thick sludge. Sometimes I add too much water and get a thin watery soup. It’s fine to mess up because if it’s too thick you just add more water, or too thin just cook it for longer. Not every recipe is so complicated that you need to carefully weigh all the ingredients, and because the main ingredient of soup is water, it’s easy to correct your problems.
The other reason I’m not telling you how much lentils or water to use is that you have to practice. Everything you cook needs a few attempts so that you know what you’re doing. Perhaps you need to make sure you’ve cut up all the carrots, or you need to make sure that you got the big bowl out from the bottom of the cupboard, where it’s underneath the stuff you don’t use. Learning how to cook doesn’t just mean learning how to chop up food, it means learning how to work in the kitchen, and how you move around in that space. If you’re doing something new, be kind to yourself - don’t make a new recipe before all your friends come round, make something you can do blindfolded and hungover. Even if it’s just cheese on toast. In fact, I would love to be invited over for cheese on toast, because I don’t have a grill, and I bet a lot of other people feel the same.
Practicing this soup is what’s going to make it come alive. When you know how to cook something, you’re not busy reading the cookbook in the kitchen, you’re busy making the food. The soup you have in Sila, or any other restaurant, is good because the chef has made that soup two or three times a day, every day, for years. When you can make the soup on autopilot, just like the chef at Sila has to, then you’ll know how to make the soup.
The last stage of making the soup is blending it with a stick blender. You can add a bit of spice, like cinnamon or some chilli oil, and serve it out on some bowls. In the above example I’ve put some feta, basil, and sesame seeds in the soup, but this soup is going to work well with almost everything.
Do you remember? The 21st of September?
Every year on the 21st of September, Demi Adejuyigbe has released a video in honor of the 21st day of September . They started out as a joke, but they became so popular that he’s started adding on a set of charities at the end. The causes this year are especially good, but mostly American-based.
For my Austrian friends, there’s a fundraiser for Velo Peaches, a Vienna-based queer feminist bicycle shop for FLINTA* (Female* Lesbian* Intersex* Non-Binary* Trans* Agender*) persons. I don’t know these people, and I’m not their target market, but I agree with their goals. Obviously, you can donate money if you don’t live in Austria.
Next week:
I’m not sure what I’m going to write for next week. If you have any suggestions, feel free to hit reply and tell me what you want. You can also hit reply and say hi!