Gourmet Vegetable Beef Soup? It is if you use steak, and why not use steak?
Every grocery store offers stew meat and that’s what most home chefs use in their soups and stews. This cut, however, is at the low end of the spectrum, quality wise. It is usually tough, chewy, and lacking in flavor. Steak, however, is a different story – tender and packed with flavor, and if you’re a frugal shopper, you can sometimes insert steak instead of stew meat for about the same price.
Last week as the north wind howled and the thermometer topped out each day at around 50 degrees, I decided it was soup time. Vegetable Beef, to be exact. I went to Food Lion and saw the usual selection of stew meat, and it wasn’t cheap. But they were running NY Strip streaks on special for $7.99 a pound. I saw a big steak and bought it. It made some of the best soup I have ever tasted.
Almost every week, one of the stores will run steaks on special, maybe sirloins or strips or rib-eyes. When that happens, buy some especially for soup. Or look in the Manager’s Special bin. They often have day-old steaks at a good discount. If you are patient, you can usually find a great deal and make some terrific soup.
There is an unlimited number of options when making Vegetable Beef Soup. You can’t really go wrong, but here’s how I made mine.
Start with a great cut of meat and cut it into bite-size portions. Brown the meat on both sides in a dab of olive oil and remove from the pan. Next, add 1 C chopped onions, a few cloves of garlic and a stalk of chopped celery. Celery delivers extra flavor to soups, any soup.
Add the meat and sauteed veggies to a large ceramic cooking pot. I like ceramic because it maintains a constant temperature and delivers outstanding soups and stews. Next, add a 32-oz. container of vegetable stock, 1 package of mixed soup vegetables that has okra (that’s key) and 8 ounces of tomato juice. Season with salt and pepper, bring the soup to a boil and let simmer at least an hour.
The flavor of the steak really comes through. It’s worth any extra cost, but if you shop around, you can do it for about the same price as stew beef.
Gourmet Vegetable Beef Soup
1 1/2 -pounds of steak
2 or 3 T olive oil as needed
1 C chopped onions
1stalk celery
2 cloves garlic
32 oz. ctn. vegetable broth
8 oz. tomato juice
1 bag mixed soup veggies (with okra)
S & P to taste
