How to Make Black Desert Online Grain Soup in Real Life
Black Desert Online is a massively popular multiplayer game that millions of people are addicted to playing. One of the most intriguing parts of the game is developing cooking skills and being able to cook something new, like grain soup.
It may seem unusual to try and replicate a recipe that exists in a video game, but there is actually a space for such culinary adventures. Some video-game based dishes actually have dedicated cookbooks that are solely based on such recipes.
Black Desert Online players are used to cultivating strategies to advance through gameplay. While cooking BDO grain soup is one of the most common ways of skill-building in the game, what happens when you want a sip of that delicious soup in real life?
How Grain Soup Came To Be
Before hammering out an attempt at Black Desert Online Grain Soup, let’s cover the basics. What is grain soup and is it really an actual dish? Yes, it certainly is a very real meal.
In fact, grain soup may be one of the OGs of the soup world — and that world is ancient. Food historians that have traced the origins of soup have found that it may be one of the culinary world’s oldest recipes.
If you think about it, that makes a lot of sense. Long before human civilizations were able to cultivate and domesticate more sophisticated crops, like corn, people had to rely on the ingredients that they could gather or hunt. That means food was either based on proteins from hunted animals or simple grains that could be collected.
Also, consider that soup is traditionally made in a pot. When archeologists are searching for buried clues to past history, they are typically looking for signs of earlier civilizations. One of the most important artifacts that are unearthed in archeological digs is pottery because it proves that people existed — mainly because people have to eat to survive. Hence, it may also be a low-key clue that those earlier civilizations were getting their soup groove on, too.
Culinary experts used to think making soup became common about 9,000 years ago. However, they have since discovered that it’s closer to being 25,000 years old. So, dishes like grain soup have probably been around for a long, long time. Fortunately, crop cultivation and spice development have given space for more nuanced grain soup recipes. That is an excellent and yummy development. Culinary evolution is nice!
All About Grains
In Black Desert Online, grain soup can only be made by visiting specific locations and collecting special ingredients. Those include:
- Purified Water
- Salt
- Cooking Wines
- Cereals
One of the potential byproducts that producing grain soup can give the gamer is special grain soup. In the game, this just really provides a resource that gamers can sell to increase in-game capital. However, this could also cause a few gamers to get a little hungry.
Obviously, grain soup is based on, well, grains. However, there are a large multitude of grains to choose from when you make this soup. Black Desert Online’s recipe only stipulates “cereals” as an ingredient. Fortunately for you, there is a vast selection of those.
In the grain world, there is a distinction between grains and cereals. Grains are derived from edible seeds of plants. Cereals are drawn from actual grass plants. As grains do grow on cereal plants, there is some room for crossover. However, there is a difference.
Additionally, there is a difference between “true” grains and pseudo grains. True grains are also known as whole grains, a very viable alternative ingredient for health-conscious cooks. There is a huge culinary movement that celebrates whole grains, a major bonus if you’re into that type of thing.
Some of the most common types of true grains include:
- Barley
- Oats
- Rice
- Millet
- Sorghum
- Rye
- Corn
- Wheat
Pseudo grains include quinoa, buckwheat, and amaranth. These tend to be gluten-free and contain more protein. Despite the differences, a grain is a grain. All those differences mean that you have more to choose from when establishing a grain base for your soup.
What Is Grain Soup?
Grain soup is a delicious dish that uses grains to elevate flavor and, often, thicken liquids. The ability that grain has to thicken soup is part of why it’s considered a hearty soup, particularly when adding other ingredients like vegetables.
Anyone can make a soup from just about anything and there are some standard guidelines for cooks that want to create their own soup recipes. However, a grain soup should place specific focus on the grain component and build around that. Think of grain as the star of the soup, while the rest of the ingredients are minor players.
If you want to create your own version of Black Desert Online Grain Soup, you have a lot of freedom on that culinary canvas. So, you really can use your imagination and have fun with it. This recipe will use the basic guidelines provided by the game (as it is very basic). Feel free to explore within that realm and enhance where you need or want to. Let’s dive into it.
Grain Soup Recipe
You will have a choice of whether or not to cook the grains separately, or just add them to the soup and let them cook that way. It’s really a matter of preference.
- 1 cup of grains of your choosing (you can also divide grains into portions that equal one cup, i.e. ½ cup of two different grains, ⅓ cup of three different grains, etc.)
- Salt to taste
- 4-6 cups of water
- 1 Tbsp of white wine (you can use wine vinegar or chicken broth instead)
Combine the grains and water. Add salt to water for flavor. Make sure to taste so that it isn’t too salty. Add the wine. Cover and simmer for 45 minutes (up to an hour with harder grains).
It’s fairly simple and broad. Feel free to get creative and add some vegetables or protein, if you want. However, if you do that, make sure to cook the meat and veggies first. Then, add the basic recipe to that addition. After that, enjoy your creation. You just made BDO grain soup.
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