Most beef barley soups from the slow cooker are thin, bland, and vegetal. We set out to
create a soup in which the star ingredients—beef and barley—shine through. Here’s what we
discovered:
Test Kitchen Discoveries
To build flavor from the onset, we browned the beef and vegetables before adding them
to the slow cooker.
A few tablespoons of tomato paste—which we sautéed with the vegetables to bring out
its flavor—gave the soup a welcome sweetness and a satiny texture.
To give our broth an even more intense beef flavor, we added a couple of beef bones—
easily found at the supermarket—to our beef broth base.
Most slow-cooker recipes call for just ½ cup of barley, but we found we needed 1 full cup
to add the proper substance and heft to the soup.
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recipe
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