Carryied over from last week's threadTime to make more soup! I was thinking soup could be a prepper thread topic. You can put leftovers in it so nothing goes to waste. It can sit and cook on its own without a lot of interference.
Been looking at crock pots but the biggest seems to be 8-10 quart. I already have a 6 quart Instant Pot which will do slow cooking too and I'll probably upgrade to the 8 quart model sometime.
Roasters come in larger sizes up to 18-22 quarts and work as a slow cooker or even a water bath canner if you get one big enough. I'm looking at a 26 quart one.
I'm wanting to do big cooking and cook less often. In the warm weather, I can cook a ton of meat in the smoker. I haven't used the vertical smoke chamber yet but it runs around 180 degrees so it should work nicely for a big pot of beans.(or two)
From Wikipedia
A perpetual stew, also known as forever soup, hunter's pot,[1][2] or hunter's stew, is a pot into which foodstuffs is placed and cooked. The pot is never or rarely emptied all the way, and ingredients and liquid are replenished as necessary.[1][3] Such foods can continue cooking for decades or longer if properly maintained. The concept is often a common element in descriptions of medieval inns. Foods prepared in a perpetual stew have been described as being flavorful due to the manner in which the ingredients blend together.[4] Various ingredients can be used in a perpetual stew such as root vegetables, tubers (potatoes, yams, etc.), and various meats.[3]
The tradition of perpetual stew remains prevalent in South and East Asian countries. Notable examples include beef and goat noodle soup served by Wattana Panich in Bangkok, Thailand, which has been cooking for over 49 years as of 2023,[6][7] and oden broth from Otafuku in Asakusa, Japan, which has served the same broth daily since 1945.[8]
Between August 2014 and April 2015, a New York restaurant served a master stock in the style of a perpetual stew for over eight months.[9]
In July 2023, a "Perpetual Stew Club" organized by social media personality Annie Rauwerda gained headlines for holding weekly gatherings in Bushwick, Brooklyn to consume perpetual stew. Hundreds attended the event and brought their own ingredients to contribute to the stew.[10][11][12] The stew lasted for 60 days.[13]
I doubt it was perpetual beyond a couple of days, maybe a week, but there is a restaurant nearby where my dad loved to go for their vegetable soup. It was slightly different every time he got it, but he always exclaimed how good it was.
To me, it was obvious what they were doing .... when they had batches of vegetables prepared to serve as side dishes, or chopped veggies like onions, celery, etc., and did not serve all of it, they just chucked it in a huge soup pot & the result was their vegetable soup on the menu. I suspect they kept the soup pot going with ‘additions’, probably for a week.
When dad could no longer drive to get his soup, I came up with a veggie soup recipe to try & get close to his favorite - made it in the crockpot. As the saying goes “close but no cigar”. He liked my version & ate it, but the restaurant soup was hands down his favorite.
“A perpetual stew...”
My late FIL, ‘Big John,’ used to keep a pot of soup simmering on the stove at all times when he had a family of 14 to feed. Whatever was leftovers from supper went into the pot, so you NEVER knew what you were getting!
I miss that guy, but in so many ways he is still with me. *HEART*
P.S. We’re sharing soup recipes on the December 30th thread, so have a few more ready for next week!
Back in my college days (early 1980s) my buddies and I would set up a hunting camp on my grandparents property over winter break. Gramma had a large cast-iron cauldron that had been used to render lard when my grandparents hosted the annual neighborhood hog killings. She would loan us the kettle to use for cooking our camp stew.
We would start out with a large sack each of potatoes, carrots, onions, celery, a couple heads of cabbage, and whatever other veggies we could get our hands on. Then we'd brown up a few pounds of ground beef, a chicken or three, a couple different kinds of sausage and toss that all in. Season the mixture copiously and that was the start of our feasting for the next couple weeks.
As the pot would start to get low we would add veggies, liquid, and the carcasses of the poor little woodland creatures that got blasted during our hunting forays during the day. Anything we could forage that we knew wasn't going to make us sick went into the cauldron. Leftovers from breakfast - eggs/bacon/sausage/ham/biscuits/etc. - into the pot they went.
The operation was about as sanitary as the southeast asian street food vendor videos you've probably seen bouncing around youtube or facebook, but we didn't care. We were all ten foot tall and bulletproof back then.