Week 2 - Soups (Thickened only)

Objective

The familiarization with the preparation of clear soups including broths and consommés, thick soups including cream soups and purée soups, and other soups such as bisques and cold soups.

Sanitation and Safety

When using leeks as an ingredient, ensure they are thoroughly washed as they are typically a very dirty vegetable. While preparing cold soups, be aware of the temperature danger zone while chilling them and ensure they pass from 140°F to 41°F within 2 hours.

Information

All soups will be prepared per the textbook recipes. Garnishing and plating will be up to us. Ensure proper temperature of the serving bowls - warmed for hot soups, chilled for cold soups.

Cream of mushroom soup - The cream of mushroom soup uses flour as a thickening agent. To ensure flour blends well with the chicken stock, warm the stock before adding it to the mirepoix and flour blend. Also, add the stock in 3 stages to facilitate mixing of the ingredients. We will purée the soup after cooking with mushrooms to get a maximum flavour blending.

Split pea soup - Split pea soup is a purée which is thickened by the starch in its own ingredients, primarily the peas. After cooking, the ham bones or ham hock will be removed so the meat can be cut from it and cubed to be re-used in the soup. With the ham out, the soup will be puréed to an appropriate consistency. After puréeing and placing the meat back in, ensure the soup is warmed to appropriate temperature for serving.

Vichyssoise (cold potato-leek soup) - This cold soup is thickened with cream just before service. As it is a chilled soup we will pay attention to the temperature danger zone and ensure it is chilled quickly enough. The soup is puréed once the potatoes are cooked, and then strained to ensure appropriate consistency. As the soup is thick, use a utensil to push the soup through the strainer to retain maximum flavour and ingredients.

Practical

As the Vichyssoise would require chilling, we decided to get to work on this immediately to give us enough time to get it cool enough. We sweat the leeks in butter ensuring not to brown them. The potatoes and chicken stock are added and simmered for approximately 45 minutes before being puréed and strained. We then place this in the fridge in an ice bath to chill.

Due to limited availability of ham hocks, we are sharing with another group. While the recipe calls for bacon as well, we rely only on the ham for meat flavouring. The ham hock is slowly cooked to release some fat and flavouring. The stock is added with split peas, and brought to a boil. It then simmers for 1-1.5 hours before removing the ham hock and puréeing the soup. The meat is cut off the bone and cut medium dice and put back into the soup. It is brought back to a simmer and ready for service after seasoning.

The cream of mushroom soup starts with us sweating the mirepoix along with mushroom stems, making sure they are not browned. Once done, the mixture comes off the heat and flour is added. This is then briefly cooked for about a minute while stirring continuously. We then add in the warmed chicken stock in 3 stages, mixing the whole time. The soup is brought to a boil and then reduced to a simmer to cook for 45 minutes. The soup is then strained and put back on the stove with the mushroom caps and cooked for another 10 minutes. It is then puréed, cream is added, and it is seasoned and ready for service.

We prepare croutons for the garnish of the split pea soup - sautéed in a pan with some oil to ensure the croutons hold their shape in the liquid soup, we then spread some garlic butter on them and place them in the oven to melt the butter.

We plate the cream of mushroom soup first, with 5 sliced mushrooms on the surface in a circle.

Next, we present the Vichyssoise, with a garnish of chopped green onions.

Finally, we present the split pea soup with croutons.

Personal Observations

Unfortunately having to share the ham hock really cut into our experience with the split pea soup, although working with another team was fine. In this case, too many cooks did not spoil the broth, and it turned out quite well.

While cooking the cream of mushroom soup, I could see the colouring of the herbs and spices coming from the sachet. This should have been an indicator early on that we were a little heavy on pepper. Tasting before service revealed that the soup was a tad peppery - not a problem for my personal taste, but not what we were aiming for unfortunately. Otherwise, a fantastic aroma and texture to this soup, very tasty.

Previous encounters with chilled soups have always been a mixed bag, so I was excited and concerned at the same time to try my own hand at making one. The sweating leeks in butter created such a wonderful aroma that you really couldn't imagine anything which tasted bad coming from this creation. I was happy to get this in the fridge right away to ensure proper chilling and then concentrate on garnish and our other soups. Once seasoned and plated, a very enjoyable soup.

Chef's Observations

For our cream of mushroom, Chef would have preferred the raw mushroom slices we used as garnish be blanched first, otherwise the appearance was fine. He showed us how the soup coated the back of the spoon indicated a good consistency and thickness of the soup. On tasting, he mentioned that the flavour was good although overpowered by the pepper as I had noticed. Unfortunately at this point there wasn't anything to be done about it, but be aware in future creations to take it easy on the pepper.

For the Vichyssoise, Chef was happy with the colour, texture, and plating - our attention to chilling the bowl was noted. The flavour was good, although when he asked us if we had added cream we realized we had missed this final step. The soup was still quite good, but would have benefit from adding cream.

The collaborative split pea soup ended up being our best showing. The consistency and thickness were good, as well as the texture. Flavour was good and appropriately seasoned. One point Chef made was our extra crouton garnish placed on the edge of the plate may take attention away from the soup itself, and suggested avoiding that in the future. Otherwise, a very good soup.

Blog comments:

This might be (maybe?) a little shorter than last week's entry because we only had one day of class this week due to holiday yesterday. Also, one of my teammates on this prep was taking pictures so I'll post them as soon as he e-mails them to me.