Why It Works
- Infusing the stock with chanterelle trimmings intensifies the soup's mushroom flavor. Using a combination of butter and stock instead of cream allows that mushroom flavor to shine through.
- Reduced sherry or white wine adds complexity without overpowering the mushrooms.
- Topping the soup with sautéed mushrooms adds yet another layer of mushroom flavor, as well as a pleasant visual and textural contrast to the silky, rich soup.
In a previous post, I showed you how to makecreamy soupout of virtually any vegetable. In that article, I mentioned that my old chef, Jason Bond, showed me how to make a creamy chanterelle mushroom soup. Tasting that soup for the first time was one of the high points of my culinary education. Today, by popular request, I'm going to share with you Chef Bond's creamy chanterelle soup technique.
For the record, this exact same technique will work for virtuallyanymushroom. Even the mild-mannered button will turn into liquid love when you treat him like this.
And now it's time to play a game called "Have You Met Tim?"
Have you met Tim?
Tim is a chanterelle. That buddy of his lying next to him? That's Tim too. So are the two chanterelles behind the first two Tims and the ones behindthem. They're all Tim. In fact,allchanterelles are named Tim. This is because every chanterelle I've ever had has met with a horrible, gruesome fate within hours or days of meeting them. Giving them all the same name keeps me from getting overly attached.*
*It's the same reason all of my goldfish and neon tetras and mollies and other tropical fish are all named Jeff the god of Biscuits. But that's another story.
Today you're going to witness one of those grisly deaths: We're going to turn Tim and his Tim-buddies into Tim-soup.
First things first: He needs a haircut. A mushroom's gotta look his best when he goes up to meet that great big Vita-Prep in the sky.
Some chanterelles are tender and clean enough to cook with very minimal trimming. Others tend to get a little woody at the bottom. To remove that woodiness, hold the chanterelle in one hand and gently scrape its side with the blade of a sharp paring knife. The sides should peel right off easily and stay connected at the very bottom, like a tiny banana.
Trim off the bottom of the chanterelle and those peels should come right off. Place them all in a medium pot and cover them with a quart and a half of chicken stock, and bring them to a simmer while you finish prepping. This will give you an intense, mushroom-scented chicken broth to cook with later on.
Here's Tim and all his Tim-buddies, looking and feeling their best, ready to tackle the world, perhaps to chat up that sassy-looking mousseronnette over in the corner. Little do they know how short for this world they really are.
But don't let them in on the little secret yet. First, let 'em know that theylookgreat, but they need a wee bit of a boost in the aroma department if they really want to impress the ladies. Shallots and garlic should do nicely.
As with any vegetable soup, you can use whatever aromatics you like to start your base. Regular onions and leeks are both swell, as is celery. In this case, I like the mild sweetness of shallots and garlic slowly sweated in butter. It boosts that mushroom flavor without overwhelming it, just the slightest hint of cologne to brighten Tim's naturally sweet and musky aroma.
Here's where things start to get a little frightening.
AHHHHOOOHHHHHHNOOOOOEEEEEESSSSS!!! WHHHYYYYYYY??? Scream a few dozen Tims all at once as they realize that they aren't going on a date after all, but rather are being fried in hot butter.
In point of fact, Tim makes no noise at all. He's just a mushroom. He sits there and takes every bit of punishment you have to give him.
As the chanterelles cook, they'll give off liquid, which should pool in the bottom of the pot. The goal here is to drive off and concentrate that liquid without actually giving the mushrooms or alliums any real color. We want clean, sweet, bright flavors here.
The best way to tell when your mushrooms are done sweating is to listen. When there's still liquid left in the pan, it'll make a faint simmering sound, sort of like "fwthpthfwthpthfwthpthfwthpfh."
As the liquid slowly evaporates and you're left with just fat on the bottom of the pan, it'll transition into more of a sizzling sound with the occasional POP or CRACK, like "szzszsK!szsPA!szzsKR!szzszs"
Got it?
This is how you know that Tim is really, truly dead, and it's time to start covering up the evidence by converting his carcass from what looks like misshapen pieces of soggy orange pasta into something creamy, smooth, and delicious.
We start with a bit of flour.
The flour is not 100% necessary, and the large amount called for in many creamy mushroom soups can indeed overwhelm the flavor of the mushrooms, making it taste more like a mushroom sauce than anything, but a single tablespoon for a quart and a half of soup is enough to help the fat we're going to add later on emulsify properly without tasting stodgy or thick.
Next up, a splash of dry sherry or white wine. You may notice I've deviated again from my standard vegetable soup technique. You all know how important acid is to flavor, right? Sometimes—most of the time—I'll add acid at the very end of cooking, so that I get the brightest possible flavor. In this case, however, adding acid at the end gives this souptoomuch brightness, when really it's all about being rich and velvety.
So instead, I use wine or sherry, which adds brightness and complexity, but mellows out with some simmering.
Remember those mushroom trimmings we had simmering a while back? Well now's the time to use it.
Set a strainer over the pot and strain the mushroom-scented broth through it. Isn't this extra brutal? We're pouring Tims' decapitated scalps right back over them, only to whisk them back away and dump them in the trash.*
*It's kind of like Hannibal Lecter holding your amputated hand in front of you before tossing it in the trash and muttering in that Anthony Hopkins voice "I would not waste a fine bottle of chianti or fava beans on mere scraps."
So far, so simple. Time to complicate things a bit.
Ok, so not too complicated. All I've added is a couple bay leaves and some thyme sprigs and set the soup to simmer for about half an hour. At this stage, it should smell intoxicatingly delicious. I meandelicious.
Once it's simmered, we're pretty much done. You can discard the bay leaves and thyme and puréethe sucker with a hand blender if you'd like, but you'll get much better results out of a real blender. A real blender is also better for the fat emulsification stage that's so essential to giving a vegetable soup some body and mouth-coating richness.
Many cream of mushroom soups call for actual heavy cream or milk. I find that these ingredients, while they can be delicious, end up diluting the flavor of the mushrooms a bit. Rather, I like to just create what Modernist Cuisine calls a "constructed cream." That is, a smooth emulsion of fat and liquid, in this case, using actual butterfat as the fat element, and the mushroom-y broth as the liquid. With the blender running, I slowly add pats of butter, letting them get completely incorporated before adding a new one.
This was always my favorite part when I made this at the restaurant. We worked in bulk so I got to shove my hand into a big ol' bowl of butter and throw it into the blender by the fistful. I don't think I've had a literal fistful of butter since I stopped working at restaurants. This oughta change.
For the ultimate in creaminess, you should press your soup through afine-mesh strainer to catch any bits of Tim that have escaped un-pulverized by the blender. At this stage, Tim has gone from being Tims, plural, to simply One Great Tim, a homogenous stew that's greater than the sum of its Tims.
Ain't that just beautiful?
At the restaurant, we'd serve this soup with a lobster, almond, and haricots verts salad, and the waiter would take the pitcher of soup and pour it out table-side, all pretty-like. You can do the same if you want (thereissomething special about watching how soup flows over and around any garnishes in the bowl, giving you a sense of what you're about to taste even before it hits your lips), but rather than those fancy beans and lobster, might I suggest you go mushroom-squared by using more mushrooms as a garnish?
Here I'm simply sautéeing some chanterelle, black trumpet, and maitake mushrooms in olive oil before hitting them with a little bit of butter and some minced shallots and thyme.
The final soup tastes like rich, velvety, liquid mushrooms, which is really precisely what it is, but I have no better way to describe it. It's satisfying, creamy, and delicious. It's a fitting and bittersweet way to close the short, sweet, and blissfully tortured life of Tim.
Tim, I will never forget you. Because there are millions more just like you.
January 2014
Recipe Details
Creamy Chanterelle Mushroom Soup Recipe
Active15 mins
Total60 mins
Serves4 servings
Ingredients
1 pound chanterelle mushrooms, cleaned and trimmed, trimmings reserved (see notes)
1 1/2 quarts low-sodium homemade or store bought chicken broth
7 tablespoons butter, divided
1 1/2 medium shallots, thinly sliced (about 1 cup), plus 1/2 shallot minced (about 2 tablespoons)
3 medium cloves garlic, thinly sliced (about 1 tablespoon)
1 tablespoon flour
1 cup dry sherry or white wine
2 bay leaves
6 thyme sprigs, plus 1/2 teaspoon picked thyme leaves
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
Directions
Set 1/2 cup mushrooms aside for garnish. Place mushroom trimming in a medium saucepan. Add chicken stock and bring to a boil. Reduce to a sub-simmer and keep warm.
Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add shallots and garlic and cook, stirring frequently, until very soft but not browned, about 8 minutes. Add mushrooms (except for garnish) to pot and cook, stirring frequently, until excess liquid evaporates and mushrooms start to sizzle, about 10 minutes.
Add flour and stir to incorporate. Cook for 30 seconds. Add sherry or white wine and cook, stirring constantly and scraping bottom of pan, until thick and syrupy, about 1 minute. Place a fine-mesh strainer over the soup and pour the mushroom-infused broth through it. Discard mushroom scraps. Add bay leaves and thyme sprigs. Bring soup to a simmer and adjust heat to maintain a bare bubble. Let simmer for 30 minutes.
Discard bay leaves and thyme and transfer soup to a blender. Close blender and blend, starting on low speed and slowly getting faster. Once blender is at full speed, add 4 tablespoons butter, one tablespoon at a time, until fully incorporated. Continue blending until completely smooth. Rinse out pot and pour soup back into it through a fine-mesh strainer. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
To serve, heat oil in a medium saucepan over high heat until lightly smoking. Add reserved mushrooms and cook, tossing continuously, until browned, about 2 minutes. Add minced shallots and thyme sprigs and toss until fragrant, about 15 seconds. Add 2 tablespoons water and the remaining tablespoon of butter. Remove from heat and season with salt and pepper.
Ladle soup into warm bowls and top with sautéed mushroom mixture. Serve immediately.
Special Equipment
Blender
Notes
This recipe will work with any mushroom. To trim chanterelles, scrape the sides of the stems with a sharp paring knife, then cut off the very bottom portion of the stem. Reserve trimmings. Split larger mushrooms in halves or quarters.
Read More
- How to Make Creamy Vegetable Soups Without a Recipe
- The Comprehensive Mushroom Shopping Guide
- Quick and Easy Creamy Mushroom Soup Recipe
- Vegan Cream of Mushroom Soup With Crispy Shiitake Chips Recipe
- Creamy Pasta With Mushrooms (Pasta ai Funghi) Recipe