Soup timer

How to use the online timer

Thirty minutes of simmering, once the onions, carrots and celery have had their time in the pan, suits a soup built from stock, tinned tomatoes and vegetables that cook quickly. Anything built on dried beans, a ham hock or a tough cut of meat needs hours rather than half of one, so this figure belongs to the quicker end: leek and potato, tomato, a lentil soup, a broth thrown together from what was in the fridge.

The half hour is not only about cooking things through. Most of the ingredients are edible well before the thirty minutes are up; what the time delivers is the flavours combining into something that tastes like one dish rather than several. A gentle simmer with the surface barely moving does this without breaking the vegetables into mush, which is what a hard boil produces by the twenty-minute mark.

Season at the end rather than the start, since the liquid reduces as it simmers and salt added early concentrates along with it. If it has gone thicker than you wanted, a splash of stock loosens it without watering down the flavour, and a squeeze of lemon or a spoon of vinegar at the very end lifts a soup that tastes flat despite being properly salted.