Dairy Free

The cooking liquid of chickpeas, unlike that of most other beans, tastes so good that it makes the basis of a decent soup. Season the beans and their stock as they cook—with garlic, herbs, and some aromatic vegetables, for example—and you have the basis of a great soup. Puree some of the cooked chickpeas, then stir them back into the soup, and it becomes deceptively, even sublimely, creamy.

Fresh asian-style noodles are everywhere these days—even supermarkets—and they’re ideal for soups, because you can cook them right in the broth. It takes only a few minutes, and, unlike dried noodles, they won’t make the broth too starchy. Do not overcook the noodles; if you use thin ones, they’ll be ready almost immediately after you add them to the simmering stock. Start with canned chicken stock if you must, but don’t skip the step of simmering it briefly with the garlic and ginger, which will give it a decidedly Asian flavor.

A good mushroom barley soup needs no meat, because you can make it with dried porcini, which can be reconstituted in hot water in less than ten minutes, giving you not only the best-tasting mushrooms you can find outside of the woods but an intensely flavored broth that rivals beef stock. A touch of soy sauce is untraditional but really enhances the flavor.

Buy rice “Vermicelli,” the thinnest rice noodles sold. Substitute angel hair pasta (you’ll have to boil it separately) if you like.

Chestnuts have a subtle but distinctive flavor; another, less-well-known attribute is their ability to lend a rich, creamy texture to anything in which they’re pureed—making cream completely superfluous. This soup is a perfect example, and if you can find frozen, peeled chestnuts, it’s the work of a moment. But even if you cannot, the chestnut-peeling process takes about twenty minutes start to finish, and much of that time is unattended; you can use it to chop and cook the vegetables. In a way, starting from scratch with whole chestnuts is preferable, because they gain a bit of flavor as you toast them lightly to remove the skins.

This is a stew of carrots, spinach, and rice cooked, you might say, to death. I first ate it at a Turkish lunch counter and was taken by its depth of flavor. The whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts.

The soup draws its main flavors from olive oil, cured meat, and watercress. It gains substance and supporting flavors from the peas and a little onion. The combination is delicious, warming, and celebratory in a rustic way. I like to serve with a bottle of Tabasco or any vinegar hot sauce at the table.

Usually, pumpkin means pie, a limited role for a large vegetable that is nearly ubiquitous from Labor Day through Christmas. But soup based on pumpkin—or other winter squash like acorn or butternut—is a minimalist’s dream, a luxuriously creamy dish that requires little more than a stove and a blender. If there is a challenge here, it lies in peeling the squash. The big mistake many people make is to attack it with a standard vegetable peeler; the usual result is an unpeeled pumpkin and a broken peeler. A quicker and more reliable method is to cut the squash up into wedges; then rest each section on a cutting board and use a sharp, heavy knife to cut away the peel. You’ll wind up taking part of the flesh with it, but given the large size and small cost of winter squash, this is hardly a concern.

This Thai soup, like most European soups, begins with chicken stock. You can use canned stock if you like, because the added ingredients here are so strong that all you really need from the base is a bit of body. (Good homemade stock has better body than canned stock, of course; use it if you have it.) You can find all of these ingredients at almost any supermarket, and if you don’t have luck at yours, try an Asian market, where they are as common as carrots, celery, and onions. (And if you do go to an Asian market, pick up some rice or bean thread noodles, which require almost no cooking time and turn this dish into a meal.) You don’t need oyster mushrooms, by the way—fresh shiitakes or even white button mushrooms are just as good. All you really need to know is that lemongrass must be trimmed of its outer layers before being minced and nam pla (fish sauce) keeps forever in your pantry (and tastes much better than it smells).

Although clam chowder takes many guises, the best is a simple affair that has as its flavorful essence the juices of the clams themselves. And as long as you begin with fresh clams, these juices are easily extracted and reserved; the minced clam meat becomes a garnish. Hardshell clams, often called littlenecks, cherrystones, or quahogs, are a must for this chowder; cockles, which are smaller, will also work well. Steamers (which have softer shells) will make the chowder sandy. If you like, try finishing the chowder with a little cream for both color and silkiness.

Water-based soups are great, but many soups are indisputably better when made with meat stock. Of course you don’t always have stock, and there are short cuts that produce in-between soups. One of the easiest and most effective ways of making a potent soup quickly and without stock is to start with a small piece of prosciutto or other dry-cured ham. The long aging process this meat undergoes—almost always a year or more—ensures an intense flavor that is quickly transferred to anything in which it is cooked, including water. To save time, chop the vegetables and add them one at a time while you’re rendering the ham; by the time you’re done chopping, you’ll have added all the ingredients except water. And if you bring the water to a boil before you begin chopping, you really minimize cooking time, producing a thick, rich soup in less than thirty minutes. Do not omit the final drizzle of olive oil; its freshness really brings this soup to life.

Most soups have origins, but none more so than this Mediterranean one of France, whose antecedent is usually called something like boiled water. At its most impoverished, this is no more than garlic simmered in water to give it flavor, with a few crusts of bread added for bulk. Simple as it is, boiled water is the perfect example of how an almost absurdly elementary preparation can be converted quickly and easily into one that is nearly grand. Use stock in place of water if you have it. This is a fine place for canned stock, because the garlic-scented oil will boost it to a higher level. Remember to cook the garlic very gently to add complexity and color; by then browning the bread in the same oil, you increase its flavor immeasurably. Also consider doubling the amount of bread given in the recipe here; like me, you may find the allure of bread crisped in garlic-scented oil irresistible.

If Stracciatella is egg drop soup’s less-well-known cousin, avgolemono is its neglected stepchild and it can be prepared easily, quickly, and almost effortlessly from ingredients that most of us always have on hand.

Egg drop soup is best flavored with soy sauce, plenty of chopped scallions, and a bit of sesame oil. Starting with a good chicken stock will yield the best results, but purchased stock can be substituted in a pinch.

Fresh peas are inestimably better than frozen for munching, but by the time you cook them and mix them with ginger, they have lost much of their advantage; if you can’t find them or deal with them—the shelling does take a while—by all means use frozen.

I like gazpacho, but the ultimate minimalist version—take a few tomatoes, a red pepper, some onion, oil, and vinegar, and whiz it in a blender—doesn’t always cut it for me. When I confessed this to my friend and sometime co-author Jean-Georges Vongerichten, he suggested I abandon tradition entirely and combine tomatoes with another fruit of the season: cantaloupe. These, combined with basil and lemon—in place of vinegar—produce the mildest, most delicious, creamiest gazpacho I’ve ever tasted. Make sure to use ripe cantaloupe and tomato at the height of the summer for the best results.

Good tomatoes are bursting with potential. The difference between consuming a tomato out of hand and slicing it, then sprinkling it with a pinch of salt and a few drops of olive oil, is the difference between a snack and a dish. And the great thing about tomatoes is that it takes so little to convert them from one to the other. In this instance—though not always—peeling and seeding the tomatoes is worth the effort. To do so, bring a pot of water to a boil. Meanwhile, cut a small X on the smooth (flower) end of each tomato. Drop them into the boiling water. In about thirty seconds, you’ll see the skin begin to loosen. Immediately remove from the boiling water and plunge into a bowl of ice water. When they’re cool, peel, then cut them in half through their equator. Squeeze and shake out the seeds. (For best flavor, do this over a strainer and recombine the reserved juices with the pulp.) Use fresh thyme (1 teaspoon), dill (1 tablespoon), basil (1/4 cup), parsley (1/4 cup), chervil (1 tablespoon), chives (1/4 cup), or a mixture of herbs to make this even better; garnish with fresh herbs, too, if you like.

“Real” Miso Soup is a little more complicated than this quick version, which begins with dashi, a basic Japanese stock made with kelp (kombu) and flakes of dried bonito (a relative of tuna). Although dashi has definite character and is easy enough to make, it is a light stock, pretty much overpowered by the miso anyway. So I just whisk or blend a tablespoon of miso into a cup of water and put my energy into turning the soup into a meal, adding cubed tofu and a couple of vegetables at the last moment. If you don’t find tofu alluring, you might throw some shrimp or boneless chicken into the soup, where either will cook in a couple of minutes. The only trick lies in getting the miso to dissolve properly, creating a smooth, almost creamy soup rather than a lumpy one. But this is in fact a snap: you just whisk or blend the miso with a few tablespoons of hot water before adding the rest of the liquid. Any cooking from that point on must be gentle to preserve the miso’s flavor and aroma.

This is my take on Senegalese chicken yassa, a rich, lemony, spicy, onion-centric dish traditionally served over rice. I've pulled way back on the peanut oil, which can make some versions of yassa too rich for my taste. In place of the oil, I built a relish around naturally rich avocados, and paired it with black-eyed peas dressed, with the advantages of a little acidity in mind, with a tangy vinaigrette.

Adapted from Chef Jim Cohen, Chef/Partner, The Empire Restaurant, Louisville, Colorado, and Pizzeria da Lupo, Boulder, Colorado This showstopper was created by Jim Cohen, who has both updated and upended tradition. Black tea? Pasilla chiles? Sweet fruit? Use ancho chiles if you can't find pasillas.