Review from Isthmus, Jan 2022

Vegetarian and vegan soups, made from locally sourced organic ingredients in Spring Green, Wisconsin, plus bakery items, delivered to your doorstep in Madison — or elsewhere in Dane, Sauk and Iowa counties — in compostable cardboard packaging.

Too good to be true? Well, it’s true. Soups I Did It Again started in 2021 in Spring Green, the project of longtime Madison-area cook David Pedersen and his wife, Bazile Booth. This winter Pedersen is ramping up the soup service. He’s now working full time at the business and trying to place his soups in several grocery stores including the Willy Street Co-op and Miller and Sons in Mount Horeb.

In the meantime, frozen quarts of soup can be ordered through their website — as well as through Dane Buy Local’s Soup’s On promotion. Quarts are also sold at Wander Provisions in Spring Green, “when it’s open, usually Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays,” says Pedersen. He also sells at the Spring Green Farmers' Market, which is ongoing through the winter, every Saturday from 10-11 a.m. outside the Spring Green Community Library.

Pedersen, a longtime Madison area chef and cook — he’s cooked at the Weary Traveler and the much missed Taqueria Gila Monster on King Street, among others — was working at the school of architecture at Taliesin when it closed in spring 2020. At that time, Pedersen went back to an idea he’d had several years before — making soups using local and sustainable ingredients for coffee shops that wanted to serve food like a cafe but didn’t have kitchen space. That’s not the current model for the business, but Pedersen hopes to move in that direction.

New soups, about a dozen, go up on the website on Sunday, for Monday (contactless) delivery. Pedersen and Booth leave the order in a cooler on the customer’s front porch. Delivery takes a few hours because there aren’t that many orders right now, Pedersen says. 

Booth is a baker, and several breads and pastries are also available — right now bialys, scones, a Brazilian cheese bread called pão de queijo — as are some condiments — tapenade, kimchi and red onion pickles.

Everything is vegetarian or vegan and organic, says Pedersen. Right now the soup menu is leaning toward legumes and root veggies (there’s a black bean, a chickpea and kale, and “buttery parsnip,” for instance). 

Pedersen says he tries to “avoid water” in the soups, which come thicker and more stewlike. He suggests meat eaters could add meat and serve a soup like a stew, or anyone can thin a soup out with additional broth or water.

Will any recipes from the late Gila Monster make it to Soups I Did it Again? Well, there aren’t any right now, Pedersen says, though he did recently serve the mushroom and cactus stew at a catering job. 

The spirit of the name of the company — a takeoff, of course, on the early Britney Spears hit — carries through in the names of some soups (“That’s Dal, Folks!”) and their descriptions: “Serving suggestion: we suggest you serve this.”

Linda Falkenstein, Madison Isthmus 2022