Soup Vs Stew Vs Chowder: What Actually Makes Them Different?

Soup, stew, and chowder are all terms that most people take for granted as straightforward until they actually have to explain what the difference is to a curious eater. Tell your family you are making beef stew, then serve them a bowl of beef and barley soup, and you are sure to get quizzical stares. But ask them why they're confused and the explanation probably stops at, "This isn't stew." Simple liquid meals have been a staple food around the world for as long as people have cooked, and they have evolved into many different forms and terms that people seem to intuitively understand, but can rarely articulate.

Part of the issue, similar to other confusing classifications like salumi and salami, is that each term encompasses different levels of specificity. That mushroom stew would never be called a chowder, but you might get away with calling it a soup. But then why is chicken and corn chowder not called stew? Why do we even need these classifications anyway? Who is this helping? Well, it turns out there are pretty straightforward definitions of what makes a stew and a chowder different, with just enough exceptions to make things maddening. It mostly comes down to the texture of what is being made, and how that texture is achieved. And it all starts with the core idea of soup.

Soup is an extremely general term that encompasses any dish where liquid is the primary ingredient. Water, stock, and dairy can all serve as the liquid base, and the other ingredients in the soup are usually cooked in the liquid. Soup usually includes additional ingredients like meat, vegetables, noodles, rice, and other grains, but it can be as simple as a strongly flavored broth like French consommé. It can also be blended with other ingredients back into a smooth consistency. Soup often employs thickeners as well to achieve different textures, which can range from starchy ingredients like potatoes to roux or cornstarch.

Soup is one of the oldest forms of cooking in the world, even predating pottery that could be used over fire. Hot stones would instead be dropped into the cooking liquid to keep it boiling while cooking the other ingredients. It has remained a worldwide food partially because the cooking process allows small amounts of protein or other ingredients to be stretched out into more filling meals. This universality has given birth to an astonishing diversity of soup dishes, with every culture on earth producing its own unique styles of soup, many of which are celebrated as national dishes. They can be as specific as chicken noodle soup, but there are entire subcategories like ramen or cream soups that are whole worlds unto themselves, and stew and chowder themselves are both specific but wide-ranging styles with their own differences.

Stew is a type of soup that takes many forms, all of which share the characteristic of having been cooked to a thicker consistency, and should always contain a hearty amount of filling ingredients. While some stews are still quite liquidy, they can also have a liquid that has been cooked down to become more like a sauce, with French beef bourguignon being a classic example of a very reduced and thick stew. Thicker stews may even be served outside of a bowl over rice, noodles, mashed potatoes, or polenta. 

Stew usually archives its thick consistency by being cooked down to reduce the liquid, which also concentrates the flavor, but it may also be thickened with additions like flour, beans, and starches. This style of cooking means that stews often take longer to make than other soups, with a long slow simmer to break down ingredients. This makes stewing very similar to braising, although they are not exactly alike.

Despite those specific definitions, there is still a huge variety of stews, and almost any basic soup recipe can become a stew if it's cooked long enough. Hearty meat stews with beef or pork are classics in the Western world, but there are lots of stew recipes that break that mold. These include Korean tofu stew, bean stews, and even sharper-flavored recipes like southwestern and Mexican chile stews.

Of soup, stew, and chowder, the last is the most specific style. In America, this mainly includes classics like New England clam chowder, and that recipe is very representative of the style. While chowder is also usually thick like a stew, it usually isn't considered a type of stew, because it's thickened in a different way. Unlike stew being cooked down or thickened with flour, chowder gets its consistency from vegetables – with potato and corn chowder being popular — or from added dairy. While chowder is usually seafood-based, it is not the same as a bisque, where the seafood ingredients are pureed into a smooth soup. Instead, chowder remains chunky. And some recipes like southwestern corn chowder forgo seafood entirely.

Chowder's name helps explain its connection to seafood, as it is thought to come from the French word chaudière (or cauldron in English), which was the pot fishermen would use to cook their catch. Northern French fishermen brought that style of cooking to Newfoundland in Canada, before it spread into the Northern United States. The use of dairy in chunky soups is the most common thing that sets chowders apart. That's the big difference between potato soup and potato chowder, for example. Of course, there are exceptions that make chowder the hardest to define, with dishes like Manhattan and Rhode Island clam chowder relying exclusively on potatoes for thickening.

The longer, slower cooking time to reduce stew is its big distinguishing trait. It's why stew is so associated with hearty meals and cold-weather eating. Whatever type of stew you make, the fillings should be plentiful, with a higher ratio of meat or vegetables to liquid than most other varieties of soup. The texture of the broth will vary by recipe, but should take on a nice glossy consistency that will coat the back of a spoon, while still being liquid enough to drip off it.

While chowder also usually has a creamier consistency because of added milk or cream, it isn't necessarily reduced or thick. Even creamier chowders should not be as thick as stew, as the dairy is mostly present for richness rather than thickening. And while versions like Rhode Island clam chowder are thickened with potatoes, they can still be quite thin compared to stew.

And with soup, consistency doesn't really enter into the definition at all, as long as the liquid stays liquid. Bisques or creamy cheese and broccoli soup can be as thick as a stew but aren't slow-cooked to be reduced like one, while lots of soup recipes are thin and almost clear. It only becomes a concern once you get into specific definitions like stew.

Of the three categories of soup, stew, and chowder, the last is the most limited in terms of primary ingredients but is also the most unclear. Because of the fisherman's origins mentioned above, chowders are highly associated with seafood, but some recipes will use meats like chicken or bacon, and there are plenty of vegetable-based variants. The creaminess of chowders appears to be the most consistent thing unifying dishes that use the name, but even then you get exceptions like the different clam chowders. The confusion may come from the origins of some chowder dishes, as the "Manhattan" version of clam chowder actually originated as a variation on New England's take, created by a Portuguese fisherman in Rhode Island. So when in doubt, you can still look at how creamy the recipe is to determine whether to call it chowder, even with some of these historical naming anomalies in mind.

In the case of primary flavors and ingredients, soup and stew are even harder to separate from each other than before, since it really is just the texture that's different. Stews can be vegetable-based or meat-based; almost anything that you find in a soup can be cooked to become a stew. The similarities between the two really underline the status of all three of these terms as mostly subjective, big tent categories, and the line of when a soup becomes a stew is going to be different for different people.