7 quick and refreshing soup recipes

With these 7 soup recipes, your family's summer meals are guaranteed to be delicious and refreshing.

1. Boiled water spinach soup with pickled star fruit or lime.

Water spinach is the most popular vegetable in the summer. It's sweet, refreshing, and very easy to eat. In traditional Chinese medicine, water spinach is considered cooling and has a good effect in clearing heat. In the summer, a bowl of water spinach soup with its sour taste is very appetizing.

Although it's a very popular soup, you may not know the correct technique to cook it to get the best bowl possible. (See cooking instructions).

2. Gourd/loofah soup with dried shrimp

Long gourds and loofahs are also two summer vegetables. They have a sweet taste, are neutral in nature, and have a mild aroma. They are very effective in promoting bowel movements, clearing heat, and detoxifying the body. Eating these two vegetables will significantly reduce heat and acne in hot weather.

Besides boiling or making soup, you can experiment with cooking zucchini/gourd with other ingredients to make the soup tastier, such as cooking it with minced pork or shrimp, clams, or mussels. You can cook zucchini/gourd with shrimp, a simple soup that is very refreshing, delicious, and nutritious.

3. Clam soup with water spinach

Besides cooking clams with sweet potato leaves, you can also cook them with long gourds, which is also very delicious.

There are two soups that people in Northern Vietnam love most during the summer: clam soup and crab soup. Not only are clams nutritious, but they also have a sweet and salty taste, a cooling effect, and help to clear heat and promote urination.

Clams can be used to make many different soups, such as sour soup with jute leaves and spinach, or cooked with long gourds and sweet potato leaves, which are also very delicious. See details on how to cook clam and sweet potato leaf soup.

4. Bitter gourd soup with stuffed meat

Bitter gourd has one of the highest vitamin C content among vegetables, and it also has cooling properties, helping to relieve heat and detoxify the body. Dishes made from bitter gourd, such as iced bitter gourd, bitter gourd with dried shrimp paste, and bitter gourd soup with meat or shrimp, are very suitable for this season.

The shorter the cooking time, the greener the bitter melon will be. Cooking it just right results in a crisp, sweet texture and less bitterness compared to overcooking. Photo: Cruisemekongriver.

For the quickest and tastiest soup, buy pork shoulder, mince it, and mix it with shiitake mushrooms, wood ear mushrooms, a little scallion, seasoning powder, good quality fish sauce, and pepper. It's best to marinate it for a few hours before stuffing it into the zucchini so the flavors are absorbed.

To retain the green color, bring the water to a boil before adding the bitter melon. Cook over high heat with plenty of water. (See detailed cooking instructions).

5. Clam soup with young beans and tomatoes

Like clams, mussels can be cooked into many different soups that are both delicious and refreshing on hot summer days.

Clam soup with tofu and tomatoes is a simple, refreshing, and unique dish that goes well with rice, and the ingredients are easy to find. (See detailed instructions).

6. Crab soup

Crab soup with jute leaves, spinach, and fragrant gourd is a delicious and easy-to-eat dish in the summer. Photo: Bao Nhien.

To cook crab soup quickly and ensure you get delicious freshwater crabs, you should go to the market on the weekend. Buy the crabs, clean them, remove the roe, and divide them into small, bite-sized portions before freezing. Whenever you want to eat, simply take out the frozen crab and crush or grind it – this will save you a lot of time. (Secret to making delicious crab soup with rich roe).

7. Sour soup with mushrooms and minced meat

This is a nutritious, easy-to-eat dish that doesn't take too much time to prepare. The combination of ingredients like minced meat (or bone broth), suitable mushrooms for soup (shiitake, enoki, seafood, oyster, or shiitake), a ripe pineapple, and tomatoes creates a sweet and sour flavor with a fragrant mushroom aroma that's very appealing to the eye. (See cooking instructions).

According to VNE