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Received — 30 October 2026 ⏭ News

I can’t stop making this cabbage

✇Salon.com
By: Ashlie D. Stevens
30 October 2026 at 16:07

I have a very specific fantasy about the restaurant I would open, should someone ever hand me a set of keys and an unlimited supply of funds and optimism. It would be a little neighborhood bistro, the sort of place where the wine comes in mismatched stemless glasses thrifted from estate sales. The menus would be illustrated by hand, which sounds charming until you’ve spent an entire afternoon trying to get the shading right on a watercolor artichoke. There would be personality wallpaper in the bathroom, icy sparkling cocktails, very good roast chicken and a bread service so generous it would probably make an accountant nervous.

Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about razor-thin margins in a fantasy. But even if I did, I know one dish that would earn its place on the menu: cabbage.

Specifically, green cabbage roasted in miso butter, then showered with crispy, lemony panko breadcrumbs. It’s inexpensive, uncomplicated and just a little chic. More importantly, I can’t seem to stop making it.

The recipe began with one of my favorite ways to cook: playing matchmaker with ingredients. If Thing A already loves Thing B, and Thing B loves Thing C, perhaps A and C would get along, too. There’s a pleasing logic to it, like introducing two friends at a dinner party and watching them discover they have more in common than the host.

I already adored miso butter, with its salty, savory depth. And cabbage cooked in butter is a classic for good reason. Putting the two together was hardly a leap. I chopped up a head of green cabbage, coated it with the miso butter and let the oven do the rest. After about 30 minutes at 350 degrees, with a stir halfway through, the cabbage had softened into silky folds, with a little browning at the edges. The butter made it rich; the miso gave it a subtle funk.

It was very good. It also needed crunch.

My first instinct was to go the baked-macaroni-and-cheese route: lightly toast some panko, scatter it over the cabbage, then return the whole thing to the oven. In theory, a golden, crunchy topping. In practice, the crumbs more or less fused into a single crust over the slick cabbage beneath. Cutting through it was less delightful than I’d imagined.

The fix was blessedly simple. I crisped the breadcrumbs separately in a pan with olive oil, red pepper flakes and the zest of an entire lemon, then spooned them over the cabbage just before serving. Now each forkful caught a little of everything: tender, almost creamy cabbage; browned edges; bright flecks of citrus; and individual crunchy crumbs that stayed crunchy.

That last part matters. The contrast is what makes this feel like a dish rather than a vegetable dutifully placed beside dinner.

And beside dinner it has appeared, repeatedly. With salmon and rice. With grilled chicken and sweet potato coins glossed with maple syrup and orange zest. With a skillet of white beans and sausage, plus sourdough for scooping. Different meals, same cabbage. At this point, I’d be more surprised by a week without it.

Lately, I’ve been trying to make room for more vegetables in everyday cooking, ideally two kinds at dinner. Not as a grim exercise in virtue, but because I want the vegetables to be things I actually look forward to eating. That means finding a few sides that are so appealing, and so low-effort, that adding one more feels less like a chore and more like, “Oh, hell, why not?”

Cabbage is particularly good at this. It’s cheap, keeps beautifully in the refrigerator and demands almost no knife skills. You can even buy it pre-shredded. It sits in the oven while you make the rest of the meal, asking for little beyond a halfway stir. Low-maintenance, low-effort, high return.

I may never open that bistro, and perhaps that’s just as well for the accountant and the watercolor artichokes. But on an ordinary weeknight, when dinner is nearly done and I find myself reaching for the cabbage again, I get a small piece of the fantasy anyway: something simple enough to make at home, and good enough that I’d happily order it out.

Miso-Butter Cabbage with Lemony Crispy Breadcrumbs
Yields
00 servings
Prep Time
00 hours 00 minutes
Cook Time
00 hours minutes

Ingredients

  • 1 medium head green cabbage, shredded (red works, too! Though it takes on a decidedly spooky dark purple color)

  • ⅓ cup unsalted butter, softened

  • 1½ tablespoons white miso

  • Freshly cracked black pepper

  • 1 cup Panko breadcrumbs

  • 2 tablespoons olive oil

  • Zest of 1 lemon

  • Pinch of red pepper flakes

  • Salt, to taste

 

Directions

  1. Heat the oven to 350°F.
  2. Mash the softened butter and miso together. Spread the shredded cabbage in a baking dish, dot with the compound butter and toss to coat. Season generously with black pepper.
  3. Bake for about 30 minutes, stirring halfway through, until the cabbage is tender.
  4. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the Panko, salt and red pepper flakes, stirring until the crumbs are golden and crunchy, about 4–5 minutes. Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon zest.
  5. Scatter the breadcrumbs over the cabbage immediately before serving. Keeping them separate until the last moment is the secret to preserving their crunch.

 

 

The post I can’t stop making this cabbage appeared first on Salon.com.

Received — 5 October 2026 ⏭ News

Your soup needs a little vinegar

✇Salon.com
By: Ashlie D. Stevens
5 October 2026 at 16:30

There comes a point in the life of many soups when they get a little sleepy.

This happens especially often with soups that are creamy, starchy or — blessedly — both. Everything is humming along just fine. The onions are soft. The garlic is fragrant. The spices have bloomed. You taste a spoonful and think, Hmm. So you add another pinch of seasoning. You taste again. Still: Hmm.

At this point, most of us instinctively reach for the salt.

But I’d like to gently intercept your hand on the way there and redirect it toward wherever you keep your vinegar. Some swear by the pantry, others insist upon the refrigerator; we will not allow ourselves to be distracted from our soup scholarship by these sectarian squabbles (at least not this week).

Because sometimes your soup doesn’t need more salt. It needs acid.

A small splash of vinegar at the end of cooking can give a tired pot an almost startling jolt. Vegetables taste brighter. Herbs seem greener. Starchy soups feel less pasty on the tongue. Spices that had faded into the background suddenly become legible again. Depending on how much you add, you might even get a delectable little Oh, what is that? pucker at the end of each bite.

I love lemon in soup, too. Sometimes I want the lemon flavor to be the whole point: a lemony avgolemono, for instance, or a chicken stew that tastes unabashedly citrusy. But lemon can announce itself loudly. Same with lime.

Vinegar can be more like a gentle wake-up than a glass of water to the face.

I first really understood this while making Alison Roman’s dill-packed potato-leek soup, published originally a little over five years ago, which finishes with white wine vinegar. Roman writes that the vinegar makes the soup taste “almost like a pickle.” I went into the recipe expecting exactly that, was delighted to find it delivered and started experimenting with the same trick in soups of my own.

The key here is finishing with vinegar. There are, of course, soups where acidity is built in earlier: Chinese hot-and-sour soups, borscht and various Eastern European sour soups all have their own traditions and techniques. But that’s a different lesson.

For our purposes, cook your soup until it’s essentially done. Then, before making the final salt adjustment, add about 1/2 teaspoon to 1 teaspoon of vinegar. Stir it in thoroughly and give it a moment. I actually like to step away from the stove at this point. Get some water. Wash a spoon. Pop my head out the kitchen window like a dog on a road trip. Then come back and taste again.

Vinegar is firmly in the category of ingredients that are easier to add than subtract. You’re not necessarily trying to make the soup taste vinegary. You’re waiting for everything else in the pot to suddenly taste more like itself.

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Different vinegars naturally play better with different soups. Red wine vinegar is wonderful with hearty lentil, bean and farro soups, and I love it in beef stew. It can also rescue a tomato soup that’s drifted too far toward sweetness.

White wine vinegar — or even plain distilled white vinegar — is excellent with potatoes, creamy chicken soups and corn chowders. Think of the logic of salt-and-vinegar potato chips: starch loves that sharp little counterpoint.

For sweeter, earthier soups made with squash or root vegetables, I tend toward vinegars with a little fruitiness of their own, like apple cider vinegar or my current favorite, white balsamic.

There are exceptions. I probably wouldn’t start splashing vinegar into a delicate seafood bisque. And broccoli-cheddar soup, for me, remains a no-fly zone. Not every pot requires intervention.

But many do.

I learned to cook thinking that “finishing” a dish meant adding enough salt and pepper. Then fresh herbs were a revelation. Acid was another one: a reminder that a finished dish doesn’t necessarily need more flavor so much as it sometimes needs contrast.

That’s especially true of this week’s soup: a hot honey carrot and sweet potato number built with garlic, onion, coriander, paprika, cumin, red pepper flakes and miso, then rounded out with savory stock and coconut milk.

Before the vinegar, it tasted good — but a little too sweet and a little too earthy. The white balsamic changed the geometry of the whole bowl. The sweetness of the vegetables became more nuanced instead of landing like a sledgehammer. The spices emerged. The stock tasted more savory. And instead of registering immediately, the hot honey left a gentle warmth at the back of each bite.

So that’s your homework for week two of Soup School: When your next pot tastes fine but somehow unfinished, don’t automatically add another shower of salt.

Add a little vinegar.

Let it sink in.

Then taste again.

Hot Honey Carrot and Sweet Potato Soup

Building on last week’s lesson, this soup starts in the oven, where carrots, sweet potatoes, scallions, miso, hot honey and a deliberately assertive amount of spice get deeply caramelized before ever meeting the stockpot. Coconut milk softens the edges. 

Then, incorporating this week’s lesson, white balsamic or apple cider vinegar keeps the root vegetables’ sweetness from becoming cloying.

A note on the spices: There are a lot of them. That’s intentional. Sweet potatoes and carrots can take it, and the coconut milk mellows everything considerably. If you’re particularly sensitive to heat, though, feel free to scale back the red pepper flakes and hot honey.

Yields
4 servings
Prep Time
10 minutes
Cook Time
50  minutes

Ingredients

  • 2 medium carrots, roughly chopped

  • 1 cup diced sweet potato, fresh or frozen

  • 2 tablespoons sliced scallion greens, plus more for serving

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil

  • 3 teaspoons garlic powder

  • 3 teaspoons onion powder

  • 3 teaspoons ground coriander

  • 3 teaspoons smoked paprika

  • 3 teaspoons ground cumin

  • 3 teaspoons red pepper flakes, or less to taste

  • 1 tablespoon white miso paste

  • 3 teaspoons hot honey, plus more to taste if desired

  • 1 cup chicken or vegetable stock, divided

  • 1 cup full-fat canned coconut milk

  • White balsamic vinegar or apple cider vinegar, as needed

  • Kosher salt, to taste

  • Coconut cream, for serving

  • Crusty bread, for serving

 

Directions

  1. Heat the oven to 425 F.
  2. Add the carrots, sweet potato and scallions to a Dutch oven. Drizzle with the olive oil, then add the garlic powder, onion powder, coriander, smoked paprika, cumin, red pepper flakes and miso. Drizzle the hot honey over everything and toss thoroughly to coat.
  3. Transfer the uncovered Dutch oven to the oven and roast for about 25 minutes, until the vegetables are tender and beginning to caramelize around the edges.
  4. Remove the pot from the oven. Transfer about half of the vegetable mixture to a blender and blend until smooth, then return it to the Dutch oven. Alternatively, use an immersion blender directly in the pot, stopping while plenty of texture remains.
  5. Set the Dutch oven over medium heat and add 1/2 cup of the chicken or vegetable stock. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the mixture becomes thick and deeply aromatic. Add the remaining 1/2 cup stock and the coconut milk.
  6. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook for about 20 minutes, allowing the flavors to meld and the soup to thicken slightly.
  7. Remove the soup from the heat. Add 1 teaspoon of white balsamic or apple cider vinegar and stir well. Give it a moment, then taste. Continue adding vinegar, 1 teaspoon at a time, until the soup tastes bright and the sweetness, spice and savoriness feel balanced.
  8. Only then, add salt to taste.
  9. Ladle into bowls and finish simply with fresh scallions and a small swirl of coconut cream. Serve with crusty bread.

This story originally appeared in “The Bite,” my weekly food newsletter for Salon. If you enjoyed it and would like more essays, recipes, technique explainers and interviews sent straight to your inbox, subscribe here.

 

The post Your soup needs a little vinegar appeared first on Salon.com.

Received — 28 September 2026 ⏭ News

For better soups, start in the oven

✇Salon.com
By: Ashlie D. Stevens
28 September 2026 at 16:30

For a while, I kept a soup journal.

Not a recipe journal, exactly. More like field notes. If I ate a soup I liked out in the world, I’d jot down what was in it, what the broth tasted like, sometimes sketch the bowl. I just adore the form.

Especially when I lived alone, it was not unheard of for all three meals in a day to be soup. One particularly triumphant day started with congee in Washington, D.C., continued with enchilada soup at an airport Chili’s and ended with pastina back home in my pajamas.

So, in honor of soup season, I’ve decided to spend the next few weeks of “The Bite,” Salon’s food newsletter, teaching what I’ve started referring to in my notebook at Soup School: a loose little series about the patterns that make soup better. We’ll talk about the ingredient your soup is probably missing — vinegar! — plus better soup toppers and, eventually, how to host a soup party.

But lesson one is the foundation for a lot of the soups I make at home: Start in the oven.

I don’t mean every soup. Some soups depend on freshness, delicacy or a particularly clean broth, and I’ll get to those. But when I want depth, sweetness, browning and the kind of flavor that tastes like something has been cooking much longer than it actually has, I start by roasting.

Here’s the method.

Roast what’s in the pot

Tomato soup was the one that made this click for me.

Mine started with garlic, red onion, sun-dried tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, fennel, olive oil, spices and an anchovy or two, all piled into a Dutch oven and roasted together.

The oven transformed every ingredient differently. The onion and fennel softened, browned and grew sweeter. The anchovy sizzled itself into the oil coating those browned alliums. The cherry tomatoes burst, their skins turning silky and their juices almost pasty around the edges. The sun-dried tomatoes somehow became even more concentrated. The spices perfumed absolutely everything.

By the time the pot came out of the oven, most of the flavor was already there.

That, to me, is the whole appeal of the method. You can build a similar kind of depth on the stovetop, of course, but the oven does a lot of the work for you. Dry heat browns, evaporates and concentrates while you go do something else.

And when you roast, push things a little farther than may initially feel instinctive.

Your vegetables should not be pretty anymore. I want onions slumped and browned at the edges. Tomatoes wrinkled and burst. Mushrooms dark. Carrots blistered. Bits sticking to the bottom of the pot. If everything still looks ready for a glossy farmers market photo shoot, give it another few minutes. This works beautifully with fresh vegetables, but frozen vegetables are welcome, too. So are drained canned beans. 

Douse whatever you have in oil, season it well and let it get ugly.

Roast your flavor boosters, too

This is also when I deploy what I lovingly think of as my potions and powders: anchovy, tomato paste, miso, soy sauce, fish sauce, bouillon paste or cubes, mushroom and brown gravy powder.

Not all at once, obviously, though I respect the chaos.

The point is to let those deeply savory ingredients spend some time in the heat rather than simply dissolving them into broth at the end. Tomato paste darkens. Anchovy melts into the oil. Spices bloom. Everything has a chance to mingle before the soup gets diluted.

Deglaze before you add the broth

Once everything is properly roasted, I add just enough broth to loosen the browned, sticky bits from the bottom of the pot. Not a carton. Not even close. At this point, the broth isn’t there to create the flavor. It’s there to capture what the oven already made.

Scrape thoroughly. Those dark little bits on the bottom are part of the soup now.

Blend only part of it

For a lot of vegetable, bean and chowder-style soups, I blend about half of what’s in the pot.That gives you body without turning the whole thing into purée. The blended vegetables thicken the broth, while the rest keep enough texture to remind you what you’re eating.

You can do this in a blender or with an immersion blender (though I tend to like the control of scooping part of the mixture into a blender and leaving the rest alone.)

Reduce it again

Here is the part that feels a little counterintuitive: after going to the trouble of deglazing the pot, I often cook everything back down again. I let the blended and unblended mixture simmer until it gets thick, concentrated and almost sticky. Then I add my final stock, cream or coconut cream until the soup reaches the consistency I actually want.

This is one of my strongest soup opinions: don’t drown the thing you just concentrated.

You can always add more broth. You cannot easily take it back out (though, if you do, it’s not the end of the world: just let the soup reduce longer.) 

Add a little. Stir. Taste. Add more if you need it.

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Finish last

Once the texture is right, I finish with whatever gives the soup its final bit of life: herbs, citrus zest, salt, black pepper, maybe cream. Those ingredients don’t need half an hour in the oven. They need to stay bright.

Once I noticed this pattern, I realized it’s how I make most of my favorite soups: tomato soup, corn chowders, vegetable soups, bean soups and even chicken soup.

For chicken soup, I roast thighs on a bed of onion, garlic, carrot and celery with big lemon slices, garlic powder, onion powder and plenty of black pepper. Once the chicken is cooked, I pull it out to shred later, while the vegetables underneath — softened in chicken fat, lemon and all those browned juices — become the base of the soup.

I am certainly not claiming to have invented roasted chicken soup. Italian penicillin nonnas have been several centuries ahead of me on that front. But the example stands.

Roast first. Deglaze. Blend some. Reduce. Reconstitute. Finish.

Know when not to do any of this

There are plenty of soups I would never subject to this treatment.

If I want something fresh, delicate or particularly clean-tasting, I stay on the stovetop. A clear miso broth with beautiful soft cubes of tofu doesn’t need caramelization. Neither does a simple cream of potato or parsnip soup (more on those next week!), or a bright, stewy pozole verde.

My spring pea soup — peas, stock, cream, dill, black pepper and lemon zest — absolutely does not belong in the oven. She is delicate. Leave her alone.

But if the goal is depth, browning and concentration, this is the pattern I come back to over and over.

Take the vegetables you have. Fresh or frozen. Add some canned beans if you’ve got them. Douse the whole situation in oil and spices and roast until things get a little ugly. Deglaze. Blend some of it. Reduce it. Add broth carefully. Finish it with whatever makes sense.

It is not a precise science. It is not particularly pretty.

It is, however, delicious.

Garam Masala–Roasted Tomato Soup with Coconut Cream

This is a current variation on roasted tomato soup I’ve been making a lot recently: warmly spiced with garam masala, fennel and coriander, rounded out with miso and coconut cream. Garam masala is an Indian spice blend whose exact makeup varies, but it commonly includes warming spices like cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and black pepper.

Yields
4 servings
Prep Time
15 minutes
Cook Time
55 minutes

Ingredients

  • 2 large beefsteak tomatoes, roughly chopped

  • 1 medium white onion, roughly chopped

  • 4 to 5 garlic cloves

  • 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger

  • 3 tablespoons olive oil

  • 1 tablespoon white miso

  • 1 tablespoon tomato paste

  • 1½ teaspoons garam masala

  • 1 teaspoon fennel seeds

  • 1 teaspoon ground coriander, or lightly crushed coriander seeds

  • ½ to ¾ cup chicken stock, for deglazing, plus about 1 cup more to finish

  • ⅔ cup coconut cream, plus more for serving

  • Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

  • Sliced scallions, for serving

  • Fresh cilantro, for serving

  • Toasted bread, for serving

 

Directions

  1. Heat the oven to 375°F.
  2. Add the tomatoes, onion, garlic and ginger to a Dutch oven or other oven-safe pot. Add the olive oil, miso, tomato paste, garam masala, fennel and coriander and toss everything together until thoroughly coated.
  3. Roast for 30 minutes, then take a look. The tomatoes should be collapsing and the onions should be well softened and beginning to brown. Give everything a toss and return it to the oven for about 10 minutes more, or until the vegetables have achieved sufficient ugliness: deeply softened, browned around the edges and sticky in spots.
  4. Set the pot over medium heat and add ½ cup chicken stock. Scrape up all the browned bits from the bottom, adding another splash of stock if needed.
  5. Transfer half the mixture to a blender and blend until completely smooth.
  6. Return the blended soup to the pot and let it simmer until it once again becomes quite thick and concentrated. Stir in about 1 cup additional stock and the coconut cream, adding the liquid gradually until the soup reaches the consistency you like.
  7. Taste and season with salt and black pepper as needed; remember that the miso and stock will already bring some saltiness.
  8. Ladle into bowls and finish with a drizzle of coconut cream, sliced scallions and plenty of cilantro. Serve with toasted bread for dragging through the bowl.

This story originally appeared in The Bite, my weekly food newsletter for Salon. If you enjoyed it and would like more essays, recipes, technique explainers and interviews sent straight to your inbox, subscribe here.

The post For better soups, start in the oven appeared first on Salon.com.

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