Sunday: Six Mushroom Soup

"Only six mushrooms? Isn't that going to be kind of bland?"

Sunday: Six (Types of) Mushroom Soup

"Wow, you made six different soups?"

Sunday: Mushroom Soup: Fuck You Edition

Anyway, enough being silly. Mushroom soup.  Here is the line up:

• Worcestershire sauce
• Herbs: sage, thyme, rosemary, bay
• Anchovies
• Beef broth
• Sherry (just a simple fino)
• Ounce of dried chanterelles
• Half ounce of dried morels
• Ounce of dried porcini
• Garlic
• Half pound of crimini
• Half pound of button
• Three nice sized shiitake (I tend not to like these, so that's why so few)
• A big yellow onion
• Salt/pepper
• Cream (unpictured)

Step one: reconstitute the dried mushrooms.  I put them in a sauce pan, covered them with water, and set it to boil.  At the same time, I sliced the onion and added some oil to get them to wilt and caramelize a bit.  My main goal was to make sure that nothing overwhelmed the mushroom flavor, so I wanted the onions to sweeten, with the same idea for the garlic.  For that, I wrapped it in some foil with a bit of oil, and then put it in the oven to roast.

Step two: when the onions were soft and slightly browning (about 45 minutes later), I moved on, and added three anchovies:

Step three: slice all the remaining mushrooms, and add them in.

Step four: look at that beautiful garlic:

 Well, maybe you don't actually need five cloves in the soup.

Step five: add worcestershire sauce and garlic to the pot, and then strain the mushroom broth in.  Since dried mushrooms can occasionally still be woody even after boiling for an hour, I chopped them a but to make sure there weren't any giant pieces.  I added these in, along with all the remaining ingredients (except cream).  The herbs were maybe a half teaspoon of each, and the sherry just a few quick glugs to add some depth of flavor. I let it stew for a bit, corrected the salt and pepper, and then added some cream.

I'm pretty sure this is before I added cream.

I wasn't completely sure about the cream, as my original plan was to plate this French Onion Soup style, with a large crouton and some cheese.  Julie thought this wasn't the best idea, and that I should go with a more customary cream of mushroom soup.  I added just enough cream to add some smoothness to the soup, but not so much that it became something thick.  This was probably best, although I'm still not sure if it would have been worthwhile to pass some of it through the stick blender.

The end result:

I still had the bread, so I toasted it a bit, and rubbed it with garlic.  A few slices of the very tasty gruyere, and some Westphalian ham to complete everything.  These matched well with the soup, as they all have rich earthy flavors, but are different enough to add some variety.

Sidenote:  As I was picking up the last of the dried mushrooms today at Foodland, I heard someone else order Westphalian ham.  I've been looking for this for years now, ever since I read about it in The Epicurean.  I'd largely assumed that this was something that wasn't available anymore, so to find it so easily was nice.  It has a distinct flavor, with the closest match being something like speck.

After spending an hour working on this post, I'm somewhat tempted to go get another bowl of this.  It's not extraordinarily filling, so I think I will have to pair it with other things for the rest of the week.