How to make Cheddar Cheese Soup - Recipe
A lighter cheddar cheese soup
Let’s make some cheddar cheese soup! This is one of my favorite soups, especially when the weather is a little chilly outside. I am not a fan of the super heavy gloopy gloop punch you in the stomach with cheese version of this soup, but rather am a fan of a lighter version that showcases the sharpness of the cheddar, and honestly it’s pretty quick and simple. So that’s what I want to show you today, let’s jump into it!
Veggie Prep
Ok the first thing we are going to need to do is some veggie prep. First, we need about 4 spring onions, and we are going to chop off the lil’ rooty bits and the tops where they start to get a little thin. We can save these for garnish later if we want. If the outside layer is a little grotty, I like to pull it off.
Next just chop these spring onions up just going up the stems. Now that we have a nice pile of spring onion rings, let’s move onto the carrots. For this recipe, I am using 2 carrots, if you hate carrots. Just go ahead and peel them and chop the ends off.
To prepare the carrots for the soup, instead of chopping them, we are going to grate them. This will give us nice and wispy pieces of carrot in our soup, instead of hunking chunks, which won’t quite work in this recipe. I am using the thin slicer on the grater, but if you don’t have a grater available, you can just use your carrot peeler to create small peels of carrot, or alternatively, you could skip the whole carrot business altogether.
Ok now time to move onto the star of the show, which is our cheese. I like to use an extra-sharp Vermont cheddar cheese, but if you aren’t such a big fan of the sharp stuff, feel free to use a milder cheese here. We want to grate or about 4 oz or about 100 grams of the cheddar, which should give us about 1 cup of shredded cheese. The size isn’t too critical, since we will be melting it anyway, so I usually go for the bigger holes on the box grater. Once it’s all grated, set it off to the side.
Alright, the last thing we need to prep is about 1 quart or 1 liter of chicken stock. And once we have that done, we are done with the prep and can finally move onto making the actual soup!
Making the Soup
To begin cooking, place a pot over medium heat. While it is heating up, toss in 3 tablespoons of butter stirring it to ensure it melts properly and doesn’t burn. Once the butter is completely melted, add in our spring onions, letting them cook for a little bit, knocking down a little punchiness from the raw spring onion flavor. We wanna cook these for about 2 minutes, or until they soften and look like this.
Once they are softened, turn the heat down a smidge, and add in ¼ cup or about 35 grams of all-purpose flour. And quickly begin stirring the flour to ensure we spread it out, it will cling to the spring onions and that is ok. Keep stirring this for 2 minutes, be sure to scrape up any brown bits that form. The goal here is we want to, as chef John always says, take the raw edge off this flour. If we undercook this, it will make our soup taste pastey, so as long as you keep stirring, it’s better to err on the side of cooking too long than under. As long as your heat isn’t too high, 2 minutes should be sufficient.
Alright, once the flour starts to look like this, go ahead and add in about a cup of the chicken stock, and begin stirring it into the flour. Mix it up, and at first, it will look too watery, but after about 10 seconds, it will thicken up and come together. Once it begins to bubble like this, go ahead and add more of the stock, stir it in and wait for it to thicken a little. Keep doing this until you have mixed in all of the stock. If you notice your soup is getting a little thin for your taste, feel free to stop there, and don’t add any more of the stock in.
Final Additions
Alright, from here the rest of the recipe is relatively simple. We can add in our shredded carrots, giving them a good stir. Let this cook for a minute giving us time to make sure the roux has thickened up the soup. After that minute, add in the shredded cheese stirring until it becomes one with the soup. Now we wanna do some final flavor crafting, go ahead and add some white pepper or black pepper if you don’t have white, and a few drops of Worcestershire sauce. You can optionally also add a few dashes of tabasco if you wish. Taste for salt, we didn’t add any, but the cheese should have some in it, so you really will have to go by taste here. After that we are done, go ahead and scoop yourself a bowl of piping hot deliciousness!
I hope you enjoyed this recipe, it’s really quick and I feel like it’s pretty straightforward. Lemme know if you have any problems when trying to make it in the comments below. If you wanna help me out, please share some of my videos, it really really helps my channel. See you all soon!
Condensed Recipe:
Ingredients:
3 spring onions
2 carrots
4 oz [115 g] sharp cheddar cheese
1 quart [1L] chicken stock
3 Tbsp [8.5 g] butter
1/4 cup [35 g] all-purpose flour.
Worcestershire sauce
White (or Black Pepper)
Tobasco (optional)
Salt
Instructions:
Chop ends of spring onion and carrot. Chop the spring onion into rings along the direction of the stem, grate the carrots on a box grater, or carrot peeler.
Grate the cheese. Prepare the chicken stock.
Melt the butter over medium heat, toss in spring onions, and cook for 2 minutes, or until spring onions soften a little.
Turn down the heat a little, and add flour. Stir to cook off the raw taste of the flour.
After 2 minutes of cooking, add in 1 cup of chicken stock, stir until it comes together and thickens. Gradually add more stock until the entire amount has been added.
Stir in carrots, and allow to cook for 1 minute.
Stir in shredded cheese ensuring it is thoroughly mixed in.
Add pepper, salt, and Tobasco to taste.
Enjoy!