New England Clam Chowder: 4 Tips for Making Chowder

New England clam chowder is a thick, creamy soup featuring clams, potatoes, onions, salt pork, heavy cream, and milk. Traditional garnishes for New England-style clam chowder include oyster crackers—a nod to the dish’s eighteenth-century origins when recipes relied on softened hardtack cracker-style biscuits for creaminess instead of dairy.

Traditional chowder recipes feature seafood ingredients, while others forgo proteins in favor of vegetables or starches, like corn chowder or potato chowder. Other key ingredients of chowder soups are heavy cream and potatoes.

The ingredients are simple, but a successful chowder requires a few important steps:

1. 1. Using fresh clams: Fresh clams are ideal for homemade clam chowder, but using them adds an extra step to the cooking process: steaming. Steam the clams in their shells, then scoop the meat out with a slotted spoon and set it aside until the final minutes of cooking. Fresh clams will give the dish a straight-from-the-shell clam flavor and the briny, sweet clam meat for which this regional chowder is notable.
2. 2. Using canned clams: Canned or frozen clams are acceptable if you don’t have access to fresh options. Since these clams are pre-cooked, wait to add them just before serving.
3. 3. Choosing the right potato: Much of clam chowder’s indelible creaminess comes from potatoes, and for that, you’ll want Russets. These fluffy, starchy potatoes thicken the stock better than Yukon Golds or red potatoes as they cook and leave behind enough of a bite to complement the clams.
4. 4. Use a blender for a creamy texture: Since clam chowder contains both milk and cream, the risk for a broken soup increases the longer it cooks. To emulsify the fats and liquids together before serving, strain out the cooked ingredients and transfer the cooking liquid to a high-speed blender, or use a handheld immersion blender. Add the cooked ingredients back to the pot, and continue to cook until warmed through.

Where there are clams, there are opinions and varying regional styles of clam chowder. Here’s how two of the most popular differ:

1. 1. Consistency: Thanks to the addition of dairy, New England clam chowder has a creamier consistency than Manhattan clam chowder.
2. 2. Ingredients: Though many of their starring ingredients are the same—onions, clams, potatoes, and bacon or salt pork—the foundation of Manhattan clam chowder is tomato paste and chopped fresh tomatoes. On the other hand, New England chowder features a creamy, milk-forward base.
3. 3. Broth: The garlic and tomato-based broth of Manhattan clam chowder is thinner than New England clam chowder, which owes its signature thickness to a roux of all-purpose flour and butter.