🇲🇽 Mexico · everyday home cooking
Sopa de fideoMexican noodle soup
A Mexican soup of thin dried fideo noodles toasted in oil until amber, then simmered in a blended tomato, onion and garlic broth until just tender, and served with avocado, crema and cheese.
Origin and history
Sopa de fideo is, according to Mely Martinez, one of the most traditional soups in Mexico, served at the midday meal in homes and in small family restaurants (fondas). The sources give no date or origin for it; they share one technique, which is to toast the dry noodles and cook them in a tomato broth.
Make it at home
- Makes
- 4 servings
- Total time
- 30 min
- Hands-on
- 25 min
Ingredients
- 200 g7 oz dry fideo (short thin noodles), vermicelli broken into short pieces also works
- 30 ml2 tbsp vegetable oil
- 450 g1 lb ripe tomatoes (jitomate), quartered
- 60 g2 oz white onion, roughly chopped
- 1 small clove garlic
- 1.5 liters6 1/4 cups hot chicken broth, or water with a little seasoning
- 1 sprig cilantro or parsley
- salt and black pepper, to taste
- avocado, crema (sour cream), lime wedges, to serve; grated cheese is also common
Method
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1. Heat the oil in a wide pot over medium heat. Add the fideo and stir constantly until it is an even, dark amber; do not let it burn, or the broth turns bitter.
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2. While the noodles toast, blend the tomatoes, onion and garlic until smooth.
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3. Pour the blended tomato through a sieve over the toasted noodles.
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4. Raise the heat and fry the mixture with the noodles for about 4 minutes, until it thickens and looks glossy.
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5. Add the hot broth and the cilantro sprig.
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6. Cover and simmer over low heat for about 10 minutes, until the noodles are soft but still have a slight bite.
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7. Remove the herb sprig, taste and adjust the salt and pepper.
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8. Serve at once, with sliced avocado, crema and lime.
Notes
- Serve right away: the noodles keep drinking the liquid, and left standing the soup turns into the drier fideo seco. The dry form, in which the noodles absorb all of a tomato-chile sauce, is a different dish.
- Variations: Excelsior suggests blending a chipotle in adobo into the tomato for a smoky soup, or adding about 150 g of browned ground beef or cooked chicken when the broth goes in. A recipe in the newspaper Plano Informativo boils the tomatoes with 3 guajillo chiles in the broth before blending (for 250 g of noodles and 1.5 liters of broth) and stirs in half a cup of cooked beans at the end.
- The colour of the toasted noodles decides the flavour; pale noodles give a gummy soup.
- If you add more broth to leftovers when reheating, the soup comes back to a brothy consistency.
Adapted from Excelsior, Sopa de fideo mexicana estilo mama, Plano Informativo, Sopa de fideo con el sazon de la abuelita, and Mely Martinez, The Mexican Home Kitchen (2020).
At the festivals
No festival we list has printed it on a menu yet.