Mushroom soup search

[vaneramos]

I love soup especially in the winter. My favourite kind is mushroom, but I have never had a recipe. Last year I relied on some high-end canned thing from grocerygateway.com, but I can't afford to spend $3 a bowl when I could make something from scratch and get several meals out of it. Besides, living alone, I have to keep telling myself that cooking is fun.

Today I found a recipe for Madeira Mushroom and Leek Soup, which I will try this week. It's in Rose Reisman's Light Cooking. Hmm, I don't know about that. Mushroom soup ought to taste decadent, so we'll see how it sticks.

So does anyone else have a nice mushroom soup recipe they would be willing to share?

Comments

[jscottharris.livejournal.com]

I don't have a recipe: I try to start out with a nice creamy base (flour, butter, milk) that, hopefully, doesn't break, and then should throw stuff in as the spirit moves me. I like to cook with herbs. You can get a lot of decadence out of a very few herbs.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

Shamelessly lifted from the subscribers-only section of Cooks Illustrated Magazine's website:

Velvety Mushroom Soup Long, slow cooking turns ordinary supermarket mushrooms into deeply flavored, creamy mushroom soup. Problem: Mushroom soups have great potential, but they often disappoint with their lackluster taste. Goal: A substantial soup, rich with distinctive, deep mushroom flavor. Solution: Cook readily available button mushrooms long and slow, with butter and shallots, and finish with sherry and heavy cream. CREAMY MUSHROOM SOUP Makes 8 cups, serving 6 to 8 To make sure that the soup has a fine, velvety texture, puree it hot off the stove, but do not fill the blender jar more than halfway, as the hot liquid may cause the lid to pop off the jar. 6 tablespoons unsalted butter 6 large shallots, minced (about 3/4 cup) 2 small garlic cloves, minced (about 1 1/2 teaspoons) 1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg 2 pounds white button mushrooms, wiped clean and sliced 1/4 inch thick 3 1/2 cups chicken stock or canned low-sodium chicken broth 4 cups hot water 1/2 ounce dried porcini mushrooms, rinsed well 1/3 cup Madeira or dry sherry 1 cup heavy cream 2 teaspoons juice from 1 lemon Salt and ground black pepper Sauteed wild mushrooms for garnish (optional) 1. Melt butter in large, heavy-bottomed Dutch oven over medium-low heat; when foaming subsides, add shallots and saute, stirring frequently, until softened, about 4 minutes. Stir in garlic and nutmeg; cook until fragrant, about 1 minute longer. Increase heat to medium; add sliced mushrooms and stir to coat with butter. Cook, stirring occasionally, until mushrooms release liquid, about 7 minutes. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover pot, and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and mushrooms have released all liquid, about 20 minutes. Add chicken stock, water, and porcini mushrooms; cover and bring to simmer, then reduce heat to low and simmer until mushrooms are fully tender, about 20 minutes longer. 2. Rinse and dry Dutch oven. Puree soup in batches in blender until smooth, filling blender jar only halfway for each batch. Return soup to Dutch oven; stir in Madeira and cream and bring to simmer over low heat. Add lemon juice, season to taste with salt and pepper, and serve with sauteed mushroom garnish, if desired. (Can be cooled to room temperature and refrigerated up to 4 days.) If making ahead, add cream at serving time. SAUTEED WILD MUSHROOM GARNISH Makes 1 to 1 1/2 cups, enough to garnish 6 to 8 servings soup 8 ounces shiitake, chanterelle, oyster, or cremini mushrooms, stems trimmed and discarded, mushrooms wiped clean and sliced thin 2 tablespoons unsalted butter Salt and ground black pepper Heat butter in medium skillet over low heat; when foam subsides, add mushrooms and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until mushrooms release their liquid, about 10 minutes for shiitakes and chanterelles, about 5 minutes for oysters, and about 9 minutes for cremini. Uncover and continue to cook, stirring occasionally, until liquid released by mushrooms has evaporated and mushrooms are browned, about 2 minutes for shiitakes, about 3 minutes for chanterelles, and about 2 minutes for oysters and cremini. Sprinkle a portion of mushrooms over individual bowls of soup and serve.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

The cuisine classique method: mince a lot of mushrooms, any kind or kinds you can get cheaply (dried out remaindered mushrooms are actually better for this recipe ... just make sure they aren't actually rotting) and a couple of shallots, then fry them with a generous amount of butter until all the moisture is out and they are thoroughly carmelised, making duxelles. Into some chicken stock put soft crumbs made from the inside part of some good white bread blendered, a tiny pinch of cinnamon and some white pepper, and the duxelles. Cook a while, until the bread falls apart, then let it infuse for some time. Check for salt. You can add cream if you wish but it's not generally necessary. Also you can blender all or part of it.

Chinese mushroom soup: get high-quality dried dong gu, winter mushrooms. Wash them well under running water to get the grit out, then soak them in warm water for a few hours. Keep the soaking water, squeeze the mushrooms and slice them. Make a thick stock from pork bones, not sweet (no carrots or parsnips). Strain the stock, add the mushrooms + soaking liquid, simmer gently (don't boil) for about 30 min, then add a slice of ginger and cook for another few minutes. Remove the ginger, thicken the soup if you wish, add chopped scallions.

Porcini minestra: use whatever sliceable mushrooms you can get on sale, the tired-looking cheap ones are fine. Slice the mushrooms about 1 cm thick and fry them slowly in a flat pan so as not to break up the slices, until they are wizened and carmelised. Shred some onions and gently and slowly carmelise those in a thick-bottomed soup pot. About a minute before they're done, add your fave herbs, like rosemary, thyme, basil, oregano, marjoram, tarragon, sage, etc plus a few fennell seeds, and fry gently. Then pour on two cans of chopped or whole tomatoes- if they're whole, break them up a little as they cook, but big chunks are fine. Add about 1/4 bottle of a fruity red wine if you wish (optional but yummy), if it's very dry add a small amount of sugar, less than a tsp., and the mushrooms. Deglaze the mushroom pan with a little water and add that. Simmer for half an hour or until the tomatoes start to fall apart. Salt if needed.

Hungarian dried mushroom soup: you can get a specific kind of dried mushroom in the Polish or Ukrainian stores, traditionally it comes on a string or in a little cello packet, and is very expensive, but you need only a handful. I think they're boletus of some kind, intensely aromatic - smell before buying if you can, if they have no scent they're old and stale. The soup is v simple: pour hot chicken stock onto the mushrooms (and a few caraway seeds if you like) and simmer for half an hour or an hour, topping up if necessary. Make a weak roux, pour the soup onto it and cook until it thickens. Salt, pepper. Fresh dill if you've got it.

Indian mushroom soup/stew: dice onions and garlic and ginger, fry until beginning to brown, then add a generous amount of powdered cinnamon and the mushrooms (whole if small or cut in chunks), and cover with water or stock. Simmer uncovered until the mushrooms are cooked, say half an hour, and the liquid reduced by about 1/4, then add about a round tablespoon or so of tomato paste thinned with a little water, or about 1/4 cup diced tomatoes - not enough to make it a tomato soup, just as a flavouring. Tomato here is standing in for tamarind paste. Simmer another 15 min. Check for salt. Perhaps lemon juice if it seems too sweet.

[danthered.livejournal.com]

But...butbut...butbutbut...you left out the step where you brine the mushrooms beforehand!

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

Oh silly me.

Peel the mushrooms with a tiny little knife you crafted yourself out of iron you mined out of your estate and smelted by hand in a colonial-era small-batch smelter. Slice into the caps exactly 1 mm deep in a spiral pattern, the spiral expanding at the rate of 1/5 mm with each rotation. Stand them on your hand-made antique birchwood platter (you did make one the other day when I showed you how, didn't you?) and sprinkle them liberally with water saturated with violet salt from the Caribbean, you know the kind that costs more than gold by weight, that you brought back from your last vacation there. Then get your minions to wipe them clean with silk dishtowels made from silk cloth you wove yourself from silk thread produced on your estate in Singapore, from silkworms you had specially modified to produce mauve silk, by genetic engineers you trained yourself...

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I can see I'm going to be busy.

Or I can just give all the recipes to my minions and order the finished products brought to my seraglio where the cooks will be bound and treated according to my degree of pleasure with the mushroom soup.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Mmm, looks interesting.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[rsc.livejournal.com]

Y'all are making me hungry.

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

Ah, so that's the meaning of "insider trade".

[currawong.livejournal.com]

I agree with all the recipes that include chicken -stock or cosomme, nutmeg, sherry/madeira, shallots and cream. What sort of mushrooms do you get there? field, porcini, ceps, boletus, oyster {cream or pink), morels, chantarelles, enoki? We're lucky with varieties here as there is a huge network of abandoned railway tunnels devoted to mushroom cultivation. In Tasmania, they've recently discovered how to cultivate truffles, (the secret is artificial lightning). Go easy on the psilocybin cubensis though, unless you want to go in for faery in a really big way.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Our supermarkets usually offer field, crimini, portabello, porcini and oysters. Enoki are sometime available, but I haven't tried them yet. I'm especially fond of oysters, and one of my most memorable culinary experiences was finding a dead tree covered with them. I have never tried magic mushrooms.