Sara Bradley’s Soup Season Tips

The Dinner Plan

Chef Sara Bradley joins Maggie Hoffman to discuss her new cookbook, 'The Kitchen I Came Home To,' and the culinary landscape of Kentucky. Th

Key takeaways

• Sara Bradley's cookbook focuses on the intersection of Southern, Midwestern, and Appalachian flavors in Kentucky.
• Tomato jam serves as a versatile 'flavor bomb' that can be used on bagels, grilled cheese, or as a vinaigrette base.

Main topics

• Kentucky culinary identity
• Seasonal soup recipes

Notable quotes

Not every meal has to be chefy.

Conclusion

A highly practical episode for home cooks looking to elevate simple in

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Thanks to Kangshan for supporting this episode. Kangshan creates award-winning cutlery that brings together performance, craftsmanship, and striking design. They make the knife you love to use for everyday prep and the knife you reach for when you're tackling something ambitious for dinner. Kangshan designs its collections for cooks who want their tools to perform beautifully and look pretty incredible while doing it. Across the brand's extensive portfolio, you'll find carefully crafted blades, thoughtfully designed handles, and collections ranging from clean and contemporary to seriously show-stopping. Find the collection that fits the way you cook at kingshancutlery.com. That's C-A-N-G-C-U-T-L-E-R-Y dot com. Use code DINNERPLAN15 for 15 % off a purchase of $100 or more. Until December 31st, 2026. Speaker 2 (1:02) Welcome to The Dinner Plan, where we start every week with fresh cooking inspiration. I'm Maggie Hoffman, and today I'm talking to Sarah Bradley, who you might remember from Top Chef and the Chopped Legends Tournament on the Food Network. She's the chef at Freight House in Paducah, Kentucky, and her new cookbook is called The Kitchen I Came Home To, Big Flavors and Tall Tales from My Corner of Kentucky. Sarah, thank you for coming on the Speaker 1 (1:30) show today. Thank you. I am so, so excited. The cookbook will drop tomorrow. So it's like so much fun to get to talk to you about it right now. Speaker 2 (1:38) It's a long road. And then it's a time capsule of actually a moment when you wrote it, which could have been a year or more ago. Goodness, Speaker 1 (1:47) we've been working on it. I think it started in 22, just like the very first talks, the kind of thoughts and ideas about it. So it's been a long time coming. What have you been cooking lately? So I'm here in Paducah, Kentucky. And one of the things I love about this place is the length of the season. Like we already had squash and tomatoes in May. Then here to September and we have still squash and tomatoes. One of the things we have a ton of are overripe tomatoes. So I love going to like my farmers and buying big boxes of canning tomatoes is what we would call them. And I brought them home. And I made the biggest batch of tomato jam I have ever made in my life. And I love it because you just put it on the stove and it cooks really low and slow. You can even do it in the oven. If you're afraid of burning it, you just leave it uncovered, let it go. And it just concentrates that summertime flavor. And Speaker 2 (2:41) then what are you doing with a tomato jam? Speaker 1 (2:43) Well, I believe that tomato jam goes on anything. So bagels and cream cheese, a little tomato jam, grilled cheese sandwich, a little tomato jam. I also think it's a really great base. You know, like traditional hot bacon vinaigrette. Well, we have a recipe for it in the cookbook, but something you could sub out for pepper jelly is something like tomato jam. I mean, it has everything that a vinaigrette would need. So you've got spicy, you've got sweet, you've got acid. All of a sudden you mix that with a little oil or bacon fat as I would do. And now you have this amazing dressing that you can drizzle all over spinach. So I just think it's such a flavor bomb. So tomato jam. Speaker 2 (3:21) I love it. I'm not a big jam maker because I'm afraid of canning, but I feel like you could make a smaller batch and freeze it and keep it for all winter long. I Speaker 1 (3:29) mean, like in the restaurant, we'll make 22 quarts of tomato jam at a time. That's not realistic for home. And so I think probably, I don't know, maybe two or three quarts at a time. And you just put them in a cup container and pop them in the freezer. No big deal. I would keep this in the fridge for at least six weeks. I mean, it's just sugar and vinegar, so it's preserved. What have you guys been cooking up in Brooklyn right now? Speaker 2 (3:53) Have you ever seen the Canal House cookbooks? I Speaker 1 (3:57) don't know if I have. Speaker 2 (3:58) There are these tiny little books from a while ago. They're seasonal cookbooks from Christopher Hirshheimer and Melissa Hamilton, who were like media folks that used to have a restaurant on the Delaware River that was really beautiful and sort of a photography and publishing space. And everything in this series of books is just really simple because it's a tiny little book. The recipes are short. Simple and special. And I love to look at them just for like reminders of what to eat. You could eat this. But I made a cobbler from one of them that is essentially topped with like a cookie style dough instead of like a big biscuit or cakey thing. It's this thin, buttery, crisp top layer. And you literally stir it together with a wooden spoon. which I can't remember the last time I made a cookie dough with a wooden spoon. And you refrigerate the dough while you do the fruit. And I did nectarines and berries, but I think you could do sliced plums and that would be really, really good. Maybe add a little almond extract and you could totally do it with frozen berries too. But it was really lovely. Just this very light sort of buttery crisp vanilla cookie Speaker 1 (5:10) topping. So yeah, I'd do it again. You know, there's this cookbook. I'm pretty sure it's Poole's Diner. And I think they have a recipe in there for like a sugar cookie. It's like a cornmeal crust. And you take all the berries and everything and you macerate them. You let them sit overnight. And then you take all the liquid that's come off and you reduce it way down. That all goes back together. And then it gets like a sugar cookie cornmeal crust. And it's delicious. We have adapted it many times over in our restaurant to something very similar that my mother made growing up. Speaker 2 (5:41) I'm hungry now. Speaker 1 (5:42) I'm hungry, Maggie. Speaker 2 (5:43) I'm glad you mentioned that book. I'd forgotten about this book, but it's so good. Even if you're not making the whole restaurant dish, but like just little vinaigrettes and sauces and that kind of thing. Yeah, that's a good one. So in Speaker 1 (5:55) the book that Speaker 2 (5:56) you Speaker 1 (5:56) are Speaker 2 (5:56) about Speaker 1 (5:57) to release Speaker 2 (5:57) tomorrow, you say that your hometown of Paducah, Kentucky and Kentucky in general. is a place that's hard to categorize. It isn't exactly Southern or exactly Northern or exactly Midwestern. It's all and none of the above. What Speaker 1 (6:13) does that Speaker 2 (6:13) mean in terms of the food? Speaker 1 (6:16) You know, I think it's funny that we all kind of think of these very four regions of Kentucky. Kentucky is a really long state. And I think sometimes people don't. really know the geography. Like they'll say, oh, I'm coming to Louisville. I'm going to just hop over to your restaurant. I'm like, well, just so you know, it's about a three and a half hour drive from Louisville. They're like, oh, okay. But you know, we have such a different style of cooking here. A lot of freshwater product, a lot of agricultural product. And we are the largest producers of beef on this side of the Mississippi. So the really interesting thing about it is that Kentucky has more coastline Speaker 2 (6:52) than Florida. Speaker 1 (6:53) I know it's this crazy little statistic that I think everybody in Kentucky knows and we're all very proud of. And it's because of all the rivers, because of all the waterways. And so when you start to think about how flavors and how recipes, how they've migrated across America, when you pick a place that is almost the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi, it's where the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the Kentucky rivers meet, you start to get. All of these flavors, all of these profiles, all of these recipes that have migrated to this region. And so we're not really one of anything. We're a little bit of like, I like to say we're the middle of everywhere, right? Because it's not really the middle of nowhere. It's just all of the diasporas, they all kind of meet in this spot. There's a really strong Jewish history here. You know, a lot of people from the Appalachian Mountains or from places like Arkansas, they're just. everybody's kind of coming together in this region and we see all of those flavors meld really well. Speaker 2 (7:51) You describe your mom in the book as a risk taker in the kitchen. Which of the things that she cooked did you love most Speaker 1 (7:59) when you were a kid? So we had dinner almost every night. We were, I was lucky enough to have my mother or father or someone cook dinner. Like we sat down after everyone got done with practice. Everyone was home from work. And we had something, maybe it was just pork chops that my father cooked on the grill, or maybe it was pizza or broccoli with cheese was out of a jar. But we always had a meal. And so Sundays were the best in my house because that's the day my mother cooked a nice meal. We sat down in the dining room, like not the kitchen, you know, and we had a great thing. And brisket, that was the celebratory dish in my household. So I think brisket, the recipe is in the book. It's for a five onion brisket. It is the most simple recipe and it's just, I just love it. We don't add any liquid to it because there's so many onions and garlic and you cook it so slow and slow that you actually end up cooking it in its own juices with the onion juices. That's still to this day, the best thing my mother makes. Speaker 2 (8:57) So it wasn't a Lipton's onion soup Speaker 1 (8:59) brisket situation. Listen, I am not against Lipton's onion soup. And it's so funny that you say that because we have a bagel recipe and we... You need Lipton onion soup to make these onion bagels. We tell you to shake out the powder and the powder that comes off goes into the bagel dough. And then right before you put them in the oven, you top them with like all of the Lipton little bits. I am never against some store-bought stuff. You know, I'm about making things easy. Like my mother, that was easy for her, right? She put the brisket in the morning. It's a huge brisket. She made enough for that, made enough for probably three meals. And so it made her life easier on. So yeah, so that or strawberry pie. Speaker 2 (9:38) I feel like there was some famous cookbook that had Lipton's on YouTube. It might have been a Joe Nathan thing. And there was another one with like chili sauce. And the thing is, when Speaker 1 (9:46) you cook these things a long, long time, Speaker 2 (9:49) it Speaker 1 (9:49) all Speaker 2 (9:50) just becomes really earthy and savory and comforting and better when it sits overnight in the fridge. You know, Speaker 1 (9:58) sometimes we'll cook brisket a day ahead of time and then put it away. And then when you take it out the next day, you're able to take all of the fat Speaker 2 (10:06) off of Speaker 1 (10:07) the top, get it out, slice it really nicely, put it back in with its liquid and onion, and then slowly reheat it. And if I had the time, that would be the way I would prefer to do it. I Speaker 2 (10:17) think we sometimes forget how hot September can still be. I'm sure in Kentucky, it's really still summer weather, but soon it will cool off and we'll be thinking about soup. And I love how this book plays around with classic soups. What are your favorite moves for soup in the fall? Speaker 1 (10:35) What I love about soup in the fall and soup in general is that you can make a soup and you can serve it chilled if it's hot outside, or you can just switch right over to heating up if it's cold outside. It's a perfect thing in a restaurant where in Kentucky, you might have four seasons in one week. Like no joke, it might snow. 12 inches and then be 60 degrees the next day and everything floods. So it's just really bizarre. But soups to me, this is the perfect time because you can play with so many things. You start to see lots of like winter squashes coming in, but you can still get melon here. So in the book, there's a recipe for cantaloupe soup, which people are always very surprised by, but it is one of my favorite and it's a cooked cantaloupe soup. And it's just. Delicious. And it's great hot or cold. And so, you know, I think we serve it with a little pumpkin seed to kind of mimic the seeds from the cantaloupe. And then I'm almost always going to have some sort of cheese kind of crumbled in my soup. Soup is also the thing that for me, you know, matzo ball soup is what I grew up eating. Grilled cheese and tomato soup. It's what I sneak out at any airport I go to because I feel like you can't really mess up grilled cheese and tomato soup too bad. But I just. I love soup. It feels so comforting and so wholesome to me. And it really is the true essence of what you're adding to it. Speaker 2 (11:56) When you're making tomato soup, what do you do with it? So I love to make tomato soup. Speaker 1 (12:02) Toss them with like a little brown sugar, a little vinegar, a little oil, and you pop them in the oven and you roast them. You get this really, really dark, concentrated tomato flavor. I then love to add a little piquillo pepper in there, blend it in with it. You know, piquillos are peppers. naturally have an emulsifying agent in them. It just exists. Peppers help with emulsification. And so you get this really luscious, creamy soup, but it doesn't have any cream in it. It's just soup. And I think the one that's in the recipe in the cookbook is vegan. I Speaker 2 (12:35) think we also sometimes forget that you can make soup feel a little more like a whole meal. Of course, you can serve it with bread, but you can put toppings on your soup. What are some things you like to put on top? So, I Speaker 1 (12:47) mean, if you come to the restaurant, what you're going to get is this beautiful glass bowl and you'd have pickled shrimp and the fresh vegetable that's in there and a fruit that pairs with it and a little croutons and herbs and oil. And then we're going to pour your soup table side. If you want to go fancy at home, you set up everybody's bowl for them before you start. And then you come over and you pour their soup. That feels super fancy. The other thing you do is you just throw