Week 3: Good Soup
and facing my fears
Chef warned us before this class, “be prepared to have soup for days”
Cream of Mushroom Soup
I only recently ended my life-long apprehension towards mushrooms. I figure if you’re gonna eat the magic kind, you shouldn’t be picking them off your pizza. I’m fine when I can’t tell if they’re in something, but I wouldn’t go to a restaurant and order a mushroom dish. Anyway, Chef Jill said there’s so much butter in this soup that even someone who doesn’t like mushrooms will love this soup, and luckily this dish was just a demo.
We learned how to make a roux, which is used to thicken a soup (or any sauce, i think?) Since flour doesn’t mix well with water, you combine flour with fat aka butter, and then in our case since we’re making soup, we thin it out by adding in chicken stock (this mixture of roux + stock is called a velouté). There’s an insane amount of literature on the difference between different soup bases and how you can turn them into various “hot sauces”, (hot in temperature, not spice).
This soup used two different kinds of mushrooms, one smelled a little more magical than the other and may or may not have been the cause of a nightmare in which I was pregnant with twins. Phew. Chef used an immersion blender at the end to make it all one [thick ass] texture. If you like mushrooms,
this would probably be a 10/10, I was pleasantly surprised with the taste, but I have to give an honourable mention to the butter, parmesan cheese and croutons for some heavy lifting in the texture department. Fun fact, all “cream of” soups are made the same way, you just swap the veggie you’re adding.
The Main Event: Minestrone Soup
I don’t think I’ve ever had this, but I fondly remember making my Sim eat this in The Sims 3: Ambitions.
Minestrone soup is basically finely dicing every vegetable you can imagine and adding stock (in our case, the chicken variety). I will affectionately compare this to an “everything but the kitchen sink” soup.
With lots of veggies comes lots of chopping. My favourite [read: easiest] veggies to cut this week were zucchini and celery. Least favourite: carrot and potato—these are super dense vegetables when raw and despite my massive, sharp knife, I found it really hard to make the initial cuts. If I was making this at home I would consider outsourcing the first cuts to an unsuspecting henchman.
Pro tip: since potatoes oxidize quickly, once you’re done chopping or even just peeling them, throw them in some cold water. I’ve heard this tip for making french fries at home, but the advice apparently stands for healthy potatoes too.
After all that chopping was done, we added the onions and the rest of the veggies in short order. We want everything to be cooked to approximately the same texture, so tougher veggies like carrots came first and we surprisingly saved potatoes until almost the end. A lot of classmates were stressing about cooking order because the printout recipe said one thing and Chef did another, but it turns out that for this dish cooking order didn’t matter that much - depends on your preference. All my stuff got mixed together on the platter I was using to transfer from my cutting board to the stovetop, so I basically put everything in at the same time and it turned out fine.
By the end of the class, I had enough soup to fill 3 containers, roughly 3 litres of soup, so I brought the leftovers to feed my brother and his wife (currently raising a real human baby) and they said it was good. Score!
I’m learning some efficiency hacks from the people in this class. One girl left her soup simmering to get a head start on her dishes and while she was away, her tea towel caught on fire. Pro tip: don’t leave a tea towel beside an open flame.
I looked up the definition of minestrone soup. The internet says it includes pasta, but we did not. If for some reason you find yourself cooking minestrone soup based on my basic description and you want to add noodles: I cannot promise this will turn out well, please seek professional help.
While carrots are still difficult, I do think my cutting skills are slowly improving. I made guacamole for the Super Bowl and the tomatoes were diced nice and small and I got rid of all the goopy parts people tend to pick around in the bowl. Unluckily for me, I only asked the room’s opinion on tomatoes in guac after I cut the tomato, and the consensus was to keep it out.
Next week’s class we’ll be poaching fish (which I’ve never done before) and cooking potatoes. I’m excited to learn about what kinds of potatoes you should use for each method of cooking because I usually just wing it. I’ll be sure to share my findings with you all.
Sincerely,
Siobhan “everything but the kitchen sink” Byrne
