The perfect shortcut to perfect soup
You’re going to want to keep a stash of these soup starters in the freezer at all times
Hey crew, and welcome back to Cool Beans! With food resolutions flooding our social media feeds, we’re jumping into January with a slate of surefire ways to set yourself up for sustainable success in the kitchen. This week’s helping taps our absolute favorite kitchen appliance: the freezer.
Our signature meal-prep hack revolves around a menu of frozen sauces perfectly portioned into ice cube trays and ready to drop into any dish and send it straight to flavor-town. With the Arctic blast numbing our fingertips and sending our teeth chattering, I decided to deploy the same technique to create a stash of hearty broth starters to make homemade “instant” ramen a snap.
A quick bowl of comfort
These frozen “soup starters” are concentrated cubes of flavor that you can plop into a pot, cover with water, and simmer into a deliciously balanced broth in minutes. This blend is a riff on a traditional creamy tonkotsu broth, which is typically made from pork marrow, but I’m using soy sauce, miso, and tomato paste to deliver the satisfying umami hit. They’re the perfect flavor weapon to toss into fried rice, a marinade, or, crucially, a big bowl of noodles.
If all you have is a stash of these cubes, packaged ramen, and eggs or tofu, you can make a pretty solid helping of slurp-worthy noodles in a hurry. (Eggs, particularly those from humane purveyors, are on the Cool Beans nice list: As a protein source, their production has less planet-warming potential than anything other than tofu on a gram-per-gram basis.) This recipe is splendid with fresh ramen noodles, but the shelf-stable ones are also perfectly fine—as are rice noodles or even soba if you prefer. For a more complete bowl of goodness, I’m also throwing in some tofu, baby bok choy, and mushrooms, but you can use whatever veggies you’ve got on hand. If you have a batch of broth bombs premade, the rest comes together in minutes.