Clear Soup Recipe - How to make basic clear broth soup [+VIDEO] (2024)

Today's clear soup recipe is a common dish in central European, Austrian and German, cuisine.

To make the clear broth soup from scratch is super easy + the soup is enriched with health-benefiting ingredients.

You can add dumplings and noodles to enrich your dining experience.

📕 What is the Clear Soup?

The Clear Soup, Klare Suppe in German, is also called a consommé in German.

Which is a bit miss leading as Consommé usually involves egg whites to get rid of impurities. It comes from French cuisine.

It is strained through a fine sieve or a plain cotton muslin cloth to get rid of impurities and to clear it completely.

The result is a flavorful clear soup.

🥕 Ingredients

For a vegetable-based clear soup, you will need a set of vegetables.

The soup requires flavor giving root vegetables. This can be a combination of carrots, celery roots, parsley roots, onions, and leeks.

Some root vegetable root varieties are not suitable for this because they don't give the right flavor to the dish. This includes beets, radish, potatoes, turnip, and fennel.

Spices and fresh Herbs

The spices used in the clear soup recipe have been essentially picked in such a way that they all have a certain purpose for our health.

• Bay Leaf: Treats a cold well and helps you to digest
• Juniper Berry: Anti-bacterial, increases appetite and improves digestion as well
• Nutmeg: Increases immune system function, reliefs pain and detoxifies
• Black Pepper: Anti-bacterial, respiratory relief and supports your digestion
• Parsley: Boost the immune system and aids digestion

You can also add allspice, lovage, and celery seeds to your soup to season it further.

🔪 How to make clear soup from scratch?

Here is an overview of how to make this clear broth soup from scratch with fresh ingredients.

The complete recipe is further below in the recipe card with US and metric measurements. The video is the pop-up.

Step 1

Prep and cut vegetables.

Heat up a large soup pot and saute vegetables.

Step 2

Pour water to vegetables and season with spices.

Cook the soup. The soup needs to reduce and infuse with the ingredients.

Step 3

Strain soup when ready. You can use the vegetables for something else like a mash.

Serve up hot.

🥣 Serving

A clear broth soup is served in German and Austrian homes and inns (called Gasthaus), either plain as is or with dumplings and noodles.

It's a common all-year-round soup, served on Mondays because Monday is a meatless Monday and people call it a Mehlspeißen (flour dishes) day.

The addition of dumplings or savory pancakes, cut in strips, is called a Suppeneinlage. Just in case if you ever venture to taste local foods in Vienna or Salzburg.

In our house, the clear soup made its appearance always on Sunday nights and it would be usually served with Wiener sausages cut in.

The clear soup is meant to give the body warmth from within on cold days. It's a concentrated broth.

The soup gives your body much-needed strength after a hard-working day.

When served as a plain starter, the clear soup is seen as a stomach tease.

So to say it's preparing your hungry stomach for the main meal to come.

The soup is also traditionally served up after a funeral with a sausage and a bread roll.

Uses

• Add Grießknödel - semolina dumplings
• Add Schöberl with Herbs - biscuit dumplings with herbs
• Add Semmelnödel - classic bread dumplings
• Add Pressknödel - flattened cheese dumplings
• Add Fritatten - savory pancake cut into strips
• With egg noodles
• As a broth to make other soups such as a green turnip soup
• Add Tibetan Momo dumplings or Chinese dumplings to it
• add sausage as in Wiener sausage
• add noodles as in ABC noodles or Pastina

🍱 Storing & Leftovers

Keep leftovers in an airtight container in your fridge. It keeps well for days.

You can freeze the soup in batches too. To reheat just place in a pot over the stove and heat up until it has melted and it's hot, ready to be served.

The vegetable leftovers, separated from the broth, can be used in another dish.

You can turn the veggies into a mash or add it to a casserole dish or make a sauce of it.

Just make sure to pick out the whole spices from your vegetables.

Please, let us know in a comment below!

📖 Recipe