Soup is a dining hall staple for its portability and warming comfort. It’s also one of the most versatile dishes in any chef’s recipe book. That adaptability is taken seriously at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where chef Mickael Blancho launched the campus’s Soup Guy program. And at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, events such as soup crawls, in which students visit multiple soup locations on campus and vote for their favorite, and a daily soup menu webpage are just a few examples of the campus’s dedication to the lunch favorite.
“It’s fun to play with new soups and things that we’ve never tried before,” says Blancho, who also runs the popular Soup Guy Instagram feed.
We asked Blancho, Santa Barbara chef Bernard Gayraud and Carnegie Mellon chef Victor Schmidt to offer inspiration with their twists on basic recipes.