Hello. It’s me, Eric Kim, filling in for Tejal this week. And I’m here to tell you the story of a broccoli soup recipe that took me months to get right.
I was delighted when I found that silken tofu, blended into a savory broccoli soup base, provided not only creaminess without cream — a texture reminiscent of kongbiji jjigae, a Korean ground soybean stew — but also a touch of sweetness to balance the bitter brassica.
It was a revelation, but the tofu was a red herring. The real teachable moment revealed itself only once I tried to swap out the chicken stock for store-bought vegetable stock to keep the recipe vegan. It was as if I had pulled at a stray thread and the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of yarn. With this one change, my magic tofu soup was suddenly missing so much.
Simply subbing in a boxed vegetable stock for a meat-based one doesn’t always work: Most vegetable stocks on the market taste like a dirty rag that has been dragged through engine oil, and they can overpower the vegetables in delicate dishes.
Inspired by the food writer Yi Jun Loh’s ingenious coconut water ABC soup, my “aha!” moment came when I skipped the store-bought vegetable stock entirely and built one from scratch with a box of coconut water. Coconut water, it turns out, lends an inexplicably complex flavor that is reminiscent of bone broth. From there, the aromatics can be simple: onion for base-note savoriness, carrot and sweet potato for roundness, and a tomato for that incomparable umami.
By creating a more nuanced vegetable stock as the first step of this soup recipe, I was able to arrive at a base that much better supported the verdant broccoli flavor I was after. Finally, my soup didn’t have a lick of chicken.
The flavor that coconut water lends is what Jun calls “umami-sweet.” What we’re chasing here isn’t meatiness, but savoriness.
There are other easy ways to make a vegetable stock full of that deep, savory flavor. All you need is liquid (like water or coconut water), a source of umami and aromatics. There are many sources of plant-derived savoriness, like kombu (or dasima in Korean) and miso (doenjang would be fabulous, too). And aromatics — like the ginger and daikon in Kay Chun’s vegetable shabu shabu, or the crushed coriander seeds and lemon in Melissa Clark’s carrot and cauliflower soup — add intrigue and help that umami-sweetness shine.
This journey toward a better vegetable stock required a paradigm shift. My vegetarian cooking blossomed only once I stopped trying to make my vegetables taste like meat and started asking myself instead: How do I make them taste like vegetables?