While I’m cooking at home from our San Francisco food tour of North Beach\Little Italy and Chinatown, I’m always looking for things that I need to find as a side dish for a dinner entree. Frequently, I might use a vegetable dish or a salad, however many times soup is a great side dish. While a soup that is chicken, meat, or vegetable based is always nice, this time of year there are also some great additional options. One of the things that’s coming into the market right now if a lot of stone fruit , such as peaches is or nectarines or things like pluots or plumcots. They’re actually a really great base for a really nice soup. While making a soup from stone fruit can be really tasty it also requires a lot of more individual choices. For example, rather than adding things like salt or pepper or other spices liberally while it’s cooking, it’s really important to taste the soup to find out how would he actually needs. For example, based in how sweet the fruit is, you want to add enough salt and pepper to bring out the flavor of the fruit soup, but not so much that you cover it up. One of the things I’ll do, if anything, is under salt and under pepper the soup and then put salt and pepper table and let people decide how much they want to add to individually.
On our San Francisco Food Tours, we can to see a lot of fruit soups this time of year. Just like I do at home, we tend to see our stops let people add as much pepper and salt if they like, rather than taking the chance oversalting and over peppering the food.
