A soupçon of experimentation

If you don’t know already, I like to make soup. I make a big batch of the stuff most weeks for my husband and I to eat for lunch. It’s enjoyable to make, partly because it’s so easy and partly because the varieties seem endless, but it’s also a good way to get vegetables into the daily diet. Some favourites so far have been spicy tomato & lentil, pepper, chilli & lime, butternut squash, chickpea & chorizo, pea, and spicy parsnip.

With the base of onion, garlic and stock, I find the world becomes my soupy oyster. In my view, soups are multipurpose. They can be luxurious, warming, refreshing, sustaining and a good way to use up stray things on the verge of turning brown in the vegetable rack. I have even bunged in half a bag of salad leaves that had rather lost their table appeal.

Having said the varieties seem endless, I sometimes feel a bit stumped about what soup to make next. I want my husband to enjoy his lunch, so it’s not a no-holds-barred situation. That’s not to say I’m afraid of trying or creating new soup recipes, as I don’t want to repeat soups too frequently, although the ingredients are sometimes driven by the contents of my fridge. This week, though, I had a particular ingredient in mind.

For a while I have thought about making mushroom soup. Since childhood I have hated the tinned stuff from the supermarket. Infrequently, but full of foolish endeavour, I have re-tried it, really wanting to like it. I did not. Such disappointment flummoxed me somewhat, because I very much enjoy mushrooms in most other guises—fried, grilled and even raw. The turning point came when I ate a homemade mushroom and garlic soup. The chasm between the insipidness of tinned cream of mushroom soup and this freshly made version with dark liquor and which as full of woody, earthy mushroom flavours was vast and deep. Thus, I went forth and bought my mushrooms.

Armed with couple of punnets of chestnut mushrooms and a 25 g bag of dried mixed mushrooms (shitake, oyster and porcini) for added mushroominess (not a real word, I know), I took a little while to think about how really enhance the flavours. Now, I can’t quite explain my train of thought in any rational light, but I first thought of frying mushrooms, which led my mind to wander to fried mushrooms on toast (something I have occasionally as a treat). Toast with a hot topping made me think of cheese on toast, to which I added a virtual splash of Worcestshire sauce, which brought me to a similar condiment, mushroom ketchup (a magical ingredient if ever there was one). The cooked cheese and mushrooms seemed to meld in my mind, and that was it: mushroom and cheddar soup was born into my repertoire.

I would like to point out that, although I reached this momentous idea without prompting, a quick search on the web clearly indicated I am not the first to do so and there are a few recipes already around. My lack of originality made me a little sad, but then I figured that by the very nature of soup being a use-up-whatever dish, true innovation is highly unlikely unless a selection of ingredients that probably shouldn’t be put together anyway are involved!

Well, the results were lovely. In the end it’s a creamier soup than the mushroom and garlic variety I had tasted previously. That said, it has bags of flavour, and I think the cheddar enriches it in terms of flavour and texture. Taking this to be a success, I’ll be trying other mushroom variations in the future, but I was pretty pleased with this for a first attempt. I recommend it to people who are of the tin-variety-hating ilk, so here’s the recipe.

Mushroom and cheddar soup

1 large onion finely chopped

3 cloves garlic minced or crushed

500 g chestnut mushrooms

25 g dried mixed mushrooms reconstituted in 250 ml freshly boiled water

750 g vegetable stock

2 tbsp mushroom ketchup (or Worcestershire sauce)

2 tsp dried parsley or 2 tbsp finely chopped fresh parsley

60 g plain flour dissolved in water

250–300 g (to taste) mature cheddar grated

500 ml semi-skimmed milk

Black pepper and salt to taste

Soak the dried mushrooms in the hot water for a minimum of 10 mins. When plump and soft, remove the mushrooms and squeeze the water out them then chop them finely. Retain the water.

Gently heat the onion and garlic in a large saucepan until the onion is soft and translucent. Turn up the heat and add the all the fresh and reconstituted mushrooms. Stir until all the mushrooms have started to brown. They should also reduce in volume a bit. Add the stock, the liquor from the mushrooms (being careful to pour slowly and keep back the last few tablespoons of liquid, which can often be gritty), the mushroom ketchup/Worcestershire sauce, the dried parsley (if using fresh parsley add it later with the cheese) and salt and pepper to taste. Bring to the boil then turn down the heat and simmer for 10–15 mins.

Bring the soup back to the boil and add the flour and water solution and stir while the soup thickens.

Remove the soup from the heat and when it has stopped boiling add all the grated cheese and stir until it has melted. Finally, add the milk and use a stick blender to part puree the soup, but leave some chunks of mushroom. Check the seasoning and serve.