If you are looking for a rich, creamy soup that is sure to impress your family and friends this holiday season... look no further! This simple recipe is easy to make yet yields an elegant dish. It's light but satisfying - perfect for any occasion! Plus it is so quick and easy, you will be able to whip up a batch in about 30 minutes or less!
We all have a recipe we miss - a dish that reminds us of a household tradition or food from a favorite restaurant which has since been closed. Revisiting some of these recipes and reviving some lost ones, let's embark on a journey called "Lost Recipes of USA".
After the success of Lost Recipes of India, in season 1 of Lost Recipes of US, we bring you an entire menu built with lost, forgotten, or mis-remembered recipes with a storied American past.
Historical Background
In the very first episode, let's go back to 1974 and visit Café Balaban in St. Louis, MO. Café Balaban used to be small café with the seating capacity of 43 people. They had a very interesting menu and perhaps the most intriguing menu item was Cucumber Bisque. The story goes that Adelaide Balaban curated this recipe inspired by French cuisine, like most recipes on the menu, and scaled it to fit a commercial kitchen.
The recipe is called a 'bisque' on the old cafe's menu. Although, by definition bisques use seafood stock, this one uses chicken stock. But they called it bisque in their old-timey menu, so we'll stick with that name for this recipe. The recipe for Cucumber Bisque is very simple - you cook down the vegetables in stock and extract all the flavors by pushing it through a strainer. Then you build the creaminess into the soup by using a simple liaison. Season and serve! This cucumber bisque can be served hot or cold. To serve hot, serve immediately. To serve cold, chill in an air tight container, overnight
Use Your Garden's Cucumbers for this Recipe
Garden cucumbers are great for pickles, but what do you use them on when they're not in the jar? This is all well and good as long as I remember to catch one every day. You can't be too careful with these monsters hiding under leaves or popping out from vines ready gulp down some unsuspecting victim! Like zucchini (my personal favorite), left unattended will grow into thick-skinned batons so huge it'll take up most of your sink's real estate--damn thing weighs more than my refrigerator after last night's poker game
Ingredients:
Cucumbers, fresh : 20 oz or 2 large, peeled and chopped Don’t forget to save a few pieces for garnish!
White Onion : 6 oz, peeled and chopped
Chicken stock : 24 oz, low sodium without tomatoes (to preserve the color of the soup)
Butter, unsalted : 4 tbsp or ~ 2 oz [in 2 parts: 2 tbsp for soup and 2 tbsp for roux]
Flour, AP : 1 tbsp or ~ 1oz
Egg yolks : 2 yolks or ~1.75 oz of pasteurized yolks
Heavy cream : 4 oz or 1/4 cup
Salt & white pepper : to season Garnish : cubed cucumbers and parsley (optional)
Preparation:
In a heavy 2- to 3-quart saucepan, melt 2 tablespoons of the butter over moderate heat. Don't let the butter brown. We are looing to preserve the color of the soup as much as we can. When the butter melts, stir in chopped onions and cucumbers for about 5 minutes until transparent but not browned.
Add chicken stock then bring back up to boil while stirring occasionally before simmering uncovered 20 - 30 minutes or until vegetables are tender. See Notes to know why the pot should not be covered.
Once the vegetables are tender and mushy, strain this through a fine-mesh strainer. Press the vegetables through the strainer to get all the juices and discard the pulp. Alternatively, you can also blend this first in a blender and then strain it. Keep the soup aside.
In the same pan that you used in the first step, melt the rest of the butter. As it melts, add in the flour and stir well to combine. This is a blonde roux. Read more here.
As soon as the flour is fragrant, add the soup back to the pot and whisk/mix well to remove lumps.
At this point, the soup is not creamy. To get that creamy texture, we will use a liaison. Read more about liaison here. To make liaison, whisk room temperature yolks and cream until combined in a separate bowl. Then, slowly pour about 1 cup of the soup into this liaison while you whisk constantly. This will bring the temperature up gently, instead of scrambling the eggs.
Once the liaison is tempered, slowly add it back into the rest of the soup while you continue whisking it. This will ensure that everything mixes properly and eggs don't scramble.
Season with Salt and pepper. If serving hot, garnish and serve. If serving cold, chill overnight in an airtight container.
Notes:
If you cover the pot while cooking any green or red colored vegetable, it tends to lose color and becomes brown-ish. In the case of this soup, as the vegetables are cooking in the stock, volatile acids are released and are carried away in the steam. When the pot is covered, the steam and the acids it contains are forced back into the liquid. Once there, the acids react with the chlorophyll in the vegetables, turning them an unsightly shade of brown.
Roux is flour and fat cooked together and used to thicken sauces and soups. White roux is usually used for cream based sauces. Blond roux is slightly deeper than the white roux and is cooked until the flour is fragrant. In this recipe, we are making a blond roux.
Liaison is a word that broadly describes the process of thickening a sauce/soup using starch (such as flour or cornstarch), egg yolks, fat, even foie gras, or even puréed vegetables. Most commonly, however, the word liaison refers to a mixture of egg yolks and heavy cream that is used to thicken a sauce/soups. In this recipe, we make a liaison with yolks and cream to give a creamy texture to our soup.
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