Ingredients for New England Clam Chowder

Series Summary

There is nothing more comforting that a bowl of warm soup on a cold winter day, or a steaming cup of Mom’s chicken noodle soup when you are feeling sick. The great thing about soup is that you can use any variety of ingredients and they are often quite simple to make. Primarily a combination of meat, vegetables, or legumes, in stock or hot water, soup has been a favorite dish for centuries and comes from the word “sop”, meaning a piece of bread served with some type of liquid. There are two main classifications of soups: clear soups and thick soups. Whether you are making a clear bouillon based soup or a thick creamy soup, there’s no doubt that soup is an easy and great dish to accompany any meal.

In this free video series, our expert chef will teach you how to make New England Clam Chowder. This delicious, creamy soup is a great for warming you up on a cold winter day. Learn each easy to follow step for chopping and sauteing the vegetables, including potatoes, onion and celery. Get tips for making the clam chowder roux, adding the milk and heavy cream and simmering all your ingredients for the best New England Clam Chowder soup you'll ever taste. This dish is sure to please the whole family with it's rich, smooth taste.

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Brandon Sarkis, on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to take a few minutes to show you how to make a really tasty New England Clam Chowder. Alright, let?s go ahead and go down our ingredient list, for today's clam chowder recipe. First thing you're going to need is about a half pound of bacon, this is just plain old grocery store bacon, nothing special about it. I did make sure I got the non-smoke variety because that'll change the flavor but if you want a smoky flavor, go for that. Let?s see, the next thing up, I've got four tables spoons of butter, just plain old stick butter. It's also a half a stick, if you don't know what four table spoons works out to, so, half a stick. I've also got, one sweet yellow onion. You could also use a white onion for this but I wanted something sweet so I went with the sweet yellow onion. I've also got about five or six cloves of garlic. It looks like three but there's a couple of these that are doubled-up. I use the whole garlic's, I don't like having to use the stuff out of the jar or the can, it just doesn't taste very good. It has a really weak flavor and it's almost kind of weird and sweet so, I'm not a big fan of that stuff. I've got three table spoons of just regular all purpose flour. We're going to use this for our roux, to thicken our soup up a little bit, the next thing up is clams. I went and bought chopped clams for this. If you're using fresh clams, you can chop them yourself but this is four, six and a half ounce cans of chopped clams, with the juice. I want to keep the juice in these. You can also buy them whole but I bought them chopped just because I prefer the look of the chopped clam, in the finished, I don't want to see big chunks of clams in my finished result here. I've also got three cups of clam juice. You can buy this in the store. Usually, it's about an eight ounce jar, when you get it, or eight ounce bottle, when you get it, so this is three bottles or three cups, same thing. I've also got three small white potatoes. I choose white potatoes, just because I'm going to leave the skin on them but if you're going to take the skin off, you can use different kinds of potatoes. I just like the overall nutrients of the white potato. It's good and it will provide that nice potato-like texture, at the same time, it won't starch up the soup too much and make it too thick. Lastly, well not lastly but second to lastly, I have two ribs of celery here, which I still need to wash off as you can tell. Two ribs of celery. I've also got some salt and pepper here and also, this recipe, you can do it two different ways, or actually you can do it three different ways. You can do all heavy cream, you can do all milk, if you want to do it that way, a little lighter or you can do half and half or you can make your own half and half. I'm making my own half and half here with, I've got a thirty-two ounces, this is a quart of milk and I've got a pint here, two cups of heavy whipping cream. I'm going to use this mixture, this combination. Basically, the end result is you want a quart and a half of whatever diary product you choose to use. With that being said, let?s get started."