Soups – Rude Kitchen

Wet T-Shirt Cold Soup

Rude Kitchen — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:06:28 +0000

What’s the summer like? FUC-KING-BRU-TAL! I hereby declare wet T-shirt season officially open. And no, this is not about the sexist sniggering of blokes with advanced dickie-do syndrome.

And here’s one of the life-saving tricks for the kitchen in summer

Cold soup for a heatwave — ingredients and method

INGREDIENTS:

400 g soy yoghurt
150 g cucumber
20 g mustard
1/2 tsp salt
1–2 tsp sugar or other sweetener
1–2 tbsp lime or lemon juice
50 g tofu
30 g oil

METHOD:

Blend the yoghurt, cucumber, mustard, salt, sugar, tofu and juice together.

While blending, slowly pour in the oil

NOTES:

Oil obviously doesn’t mix with yoghurt, which is mostly water.

But both soy and mustard contain lecithin, an emulsifier, which is why blending lets you mix the oil thoroughly into the water. Exactly the same mechanism is used for making mayonnaise from soy milk

SERVING:

Best straight from the fridge. If it’s really hot, you can serve it with ice cubes

How hot does a kitchen actually get in summer?

In summer I look at the weather forecast with more dread than at a child-support summons.

The kitchen is always at least a few, usually ten degrees hotter than outside. Lucky me that during the last heatwave, when it hit 38°, we had no guests. And for the next event the forecast says a fairly moderate twenty-something degrees.

On top of the heat in the kitchen there’s high humidity. For ****’s sake, no need to fly to exotic countries, you’ve got the tropics right there at work.

And of course kitchens have extractor hoods over the stove, but when it’s hot outside, they mainly pull out the water and oil vapour from above the pots, and the particles rising from them while you cook — the temperature barely drops.

How do you cool down in a hot kitchen?

If you can’t cool the room, you can cool yourself. A water spray bottle, say, or soaking your cap. But the king of these methods is the wet T-shirt.

The best way to cool down in a hot kitchen is a wet T-shirt, soaked in cool water.

What counts as real work?

That’s the kitchen. Hard, tough, chop or die… That’s proper work, not ******* about with nonsense.

This is what I’d do, I’m no techno-utopian, but I believe in what technology can do and it could already be done:

First, an hour of hard work, not necessarily in a kitchen. A tram driver doesn’t have it easy either, or a Lidl checkout girl (even now they no longer have to wear nappies to work). And only then an hour of ******* about with nonsense.

Most of the intelligentsia and LinkedIn experts, if they swung a shovel for a few hours, wouldn’t have the strength left for ******* about with nonsense online. The strength would be with working people, the grafters, for whom 8 hours of ******* graft is the norm.

By the way, I’ve got a second point for the definition of what real work is.

Reminder of the first: real work is work your smartwatch registers as a workout

The second: work during which you’ve no time for ******* about with nonsense online.

So is your job real work, or at best a bullshit job?

Or, the horror, are you a LinkedIn expert?

Questions you’d ask anyway

What thickens a cold soup without cream?
Nothing. Tofu and soy yoghurt bring the body themselves, and the oil driven in by the blender turns it into an emulsion. You control the thickness with the tofu — more tofu, thicker soup.

Why doesn’t the oil separate from the yoghurt?
Because soy and mustard contain lecithin. That’s an emulsifier — it holds fat and water together, exactly like in mayonnaise. Pour the oil in slowly with the blender running.

How do you cool down in a kitchen that hits 38°C?
A wet T-shirt soaked in cool water. A spray bottle and a soaked cap work too, just not as long. The extractor hood pulls out vapour, not temperature.

What is a bullshit job?
David Graeber’s term — a job the person doing it considers pointless. My two tests: real work is work your smartwatch registers as a workout, and work that leaves you no time for the internet.

Read next:

How to Avoid Food Poisoning in Summer — heat isn’t only about discomfort
Five Dark Sides of Working in a Kitchen — the long version of “chop or die”
Plant-Based Yolk Sauce — same mustard emulsion, different job
More soups

In our kitchen world, the best motivation for good work is a good tip. If you like my recipes, leave me a tip

My social media

Ultimate Gemuse Boulion

Rude Kitchen — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:00:00 +0000

“In water, fish screw,” as folk wisdom says — so in vegan or plant-based cooking, there’s no place for water. Because that wouldn’t be vegan.

Seriously, though: cooking soups, sauces, etc., using juice, oat milk, or broth instead of plain water lifts them to a whole new level.

I developed this broth over several years, starting in 2020, when I received an unexpected gift for the kitchen.

INGREDIENTS:

1 bundle of soup vegetables with cabbage
30 ml oil
1 large onion
2 dried figs
50 g brown lentils
4 L of water
optional: parsley stems, woody ends of green asparagus

METHOD:
Cut the root vegetables into large chunks, and cut the onion in half.
Add the oil, root vegetables, and onion to a pot.
Fry them hard — until well browned, even slightly charred.

Pour in cold water, add the cabbage, leek, figs, and lentils.
Optionally add parsley stems and/or asparagus ends.

Simmer over VERY LOW heat — only occasional bubbles should appear — covered,
for 3 hours or longer.

Let cool.
Strain.
Use as needed.

VARIATIONS:
As I mentioned, this broth underwent many iterations along the way — and I strongly encourage experimentation. Light soy sauce, garlic, or dried vegetables instead of fresh ones all work well.

NOTES:
Green asparagus ends are packed with umami, and parsley stems add extra classic broth flavor.
Parsley stems can also be added straight from the freezer.
Another interesting umami booster is a tomato added to the broth — ideally one that’s already too soft for sandwiches.

The gift I mentioned was several dozen kilograms of mixed dried vegetables. Wanting to use them somehow, I started cooking broth from them. Since then, I’ve revised the recipe several times (one version included soy sauce). After the dried vegetables ran out, I started buying soup greens for broth at Edeka — two or three carrots, a piece of celery root, plus a parsnip, some cabbage, and a small leek.

What matters most — and what I consider my contribution to humanity — is the addition of figs and lentils.
That means adding sugars and protein, which enables the key Maillard reactions during cooking that build depth and intensity of flavor in the broth.

In classic broth, the protein source is meat, bones with meat, etc.

This is another example of something I’ve been repeating for years:
One of the most common mistakes in plant-based cooking is the mindset: “I’ll remove the meat, and it becomes a veggie dish,” or “I’ll remove the meat and replace it with just anything.”

No — that’s a mistake. A BIG mistake.

Meat serves functional roles in food, above all as a protein source (and fat — though modern diets already contain more than enough fat, especially saturated fat). If we remove meat from a recipe, we should replace it with something protein-rich.

As this broth shows, it’s not only about nutritional protein needs — protein is also necessary for proper flavor development in what we cook.

In our kitchen world, the best motivation for good work is a good tip. If you like my recipes, leave me a tip

Oat Borscht

Rude Kitchen — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 12:50:00 +0000

For about fifteen hundred years, borscht has been one of the foundations of Polish and, more broadly, East Slavic cuisine. Originally made from fermented leaves of Heracleum sphondylium (which gave the dish its name), it later came to mean soups prepared on various types of sour starters — that is, fermented vegetables. Today the most popular version is beet borscht, which often isn’t truly borscht at all, since it’s acidified with vinegar or, in better cases, with sauerkraut or pickle brine.

Borscht can also be made with flour (this variation is now known as white borscht). As one of the Christmas Eve soups, I propose oat borscht, inspired by a traditional Christmas Eve recipe from the Brzozów region in Podkarpacie, in southeastern Poland.

INGREDIENTS

Starter

250 g oat flakes
2 tbsp rye flour
1 tbsp wheat flour
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt

Soup

20 g dried mushrooms
1 l broth
1 onion (about 60 g)
4 pieces of TVP protein (optional)
30 g linseed oil
200 ml oat cream
4 pieces of TVP protein (optional)

PREPARATION

Starter:
Pour one liter of boiled and cooled water over the oat flakes, flours, and sugar. Add the sugar and mix. Cover with a cloth secured around the jar or container with a rubber band — you want airflow, but not insects getting into the starter.
Leave in a warm place for two to five days. The borscht will ferment clearly, developing a distinct sour aroma.

Soup:
Soak the mushrooms in hot water and leave to cool.
Strain the starter.
Slice the onion into thin strips and sauté in oil until lightly browned. Add the broth, the strained starter, and the mushrooms.
Bring to a boil, stirring — the borscht contains quite a lot of flour, and without stirring or with too much heat, it will burn quickly.
Once it boils, add the oat cream, stir, and remove from the heat.
Cut the TVP into thin strips, fry until well browned (preferably in linseed oil), and add to the borscht.

In the food business, the best motivation for good work is a good tip. If you like my recipes, leave me a tip: