Cullen Skink - A Dreamy Scottish Soup

hello ladies and gentlemen welcome back to uncle matt's cookery lessons this week making cullen skink which is a beautiful rich creamy soup from scotland [Music] hello i'm going to be making a scottish soup very hearty slightly creamy it's called cullen skink the main ingredient is this wonderful bit of smoked haddock he's gonna have some potato leek and onions in there yes i know it sounds extremely similar to the north american chowder and it is i'm not sure which one came first i'm not gonna get into any squabbles about it either so anyway i'm just going to make this thing and i think you'll really like it all right so from the fishing village of cullen in mourinho i think i've said that right in scotland we have cullen skink to start off with we're taking some smoked haddock undyed adding the milk into a pan with a few little aromatics and bay leaves and some peppercorns and we're going to pop that over a very very low heat to sort of steam and simmer very gently for about seven or eight minutes or so just until it's nice and tender and so just uh turn that down a little bit more there uncle matt we want to do it really slow because if you boil fish like that it will end up all tough and it's not as nice obviously so yeah cullen skink um cullen is the town it's a fishing village i think they've been fishing there for about 500 years i couldn't find any record of exactly how old this dish is but it's old um and it's partly gaelic i think the skink refers to shin of beef and i think that was a term people used to describe soups back in the day so i don't know that's about as far as my research took me dicing some leaks there i just break them down because i wanted them to be sort of evenly sized i'd like everything that goes in this soup because it's a broth style to be reasonably evenly sized so that's why i took a bit of time there and if you watch many of my videos you'll see i've been dicing an awful lot of onions lately so anyway i'm going to do that again here for you three pleasure but yeah so it's an andrew's day not too far it's at the end i think it's at the end of november isn't it and um that's a good excuse to have this soup other good excuses to have it well one is because it's just really nice and you can have it any time you want but you can have burns night or you can have the very rare occasion when scotland beat england at something which doesn't happen very often does it last but you know you keep trying but here we go let's uh let's get the rest of these ingredients cooking so into a separate pan melting the butter a little with a little bit of oil just to stop the butter from burning i'm gonna sweat these vegetables so in goes the uh well when i'm ready in goes the onion give that a minute or so and then the leek i'm just draining it now i washed it thoroughly in cold water to get rid of any grit drained it and that went into the pot as well and just to get those going a pinch of salt just to uh it draws out some moisture speeds up the cooking process but again over a fairly low heat there just to get that going that's after about four or five minutes let's pop in the potatoes now for this i've used some new potatoes which is not traditional i think it would usually be more of a flowery potato rather than a waxy one something like a marist pipe or russet but i wanted them to sort of hold their form a bit more many of the dishes i've seen they're quite happy for the potato to break up and sort of thicken the soup a bit but i didn't want that and that was the water again it's all in the uh all in the full recipes in the description and in my new website which i'll share a link to that as well very exciting times and this is about yeah about seven or eight minutes later a very very gentle poaching stroke steaming the fish is ready it's a bit hot for me to flake at the moment so i'm just going to give that yeah back off there and come out just going to give that another minute or two just to cool down a bit and then we're going to get in there there you see not quite as much steam coming off we can handle it without burning and delicate little fingers the southern softie here and if it's not cooked obviously the skin is not going to come off very easily but there you go it's coming off peeling off but the fish is beautifully cooked nice and moist and juicy i think it used to have a different name finnan hadi would be the absolute traditional name of the smoked haddock which they catch at cullen which they produce there but you know any smoke had it would be fine as long as it's undyed and you saw me there just a moment ago take care to remove the little pin bones because they're very unpleasant and you don't want them in your mouth not very nice at all is it puts you off fish really and then breaking it up into sort of rough roughly similar sized pieces but they're gonna break up a bit when they go back in the pot which is soon but first of all we're going to add that lovely poaching milk after we've checked yeah so sorry stepping ahead of myself about 10 minutes in when you think your potatoes are just about cooked that's when you get the milk and cream in first the infused milk followed by the cream and if you don't want your dish to be too rich then don't put the cream we'll put a lighter cream but like a single cream that is a what we call double cream in the states you'd call it heavy cream very rich in with the smoked haddock and gently gently stir that but we do want to give that a couple of minutes to get those flavors mingling yes marrying beautifully together seasoning along the way tons and tons of pepper a bit of salt easy with the salt though because the uh smoked had to be quite salty yeah just keep tasting it and just be aware obviously when you taste a small amount of soup it's different imagine having a whole bowl of it so it you know be aware sometimes you can overseas and stuff you can always add a bit more seasoning when you're having it can't you and there we go the parsley went in some of the parsley because i wanted to keep a little bit back for making it look pretty for the pictures at the end and i decided a tiny bit more seasoning was required a little bit of bread which i'm gonna stick in the toaster a final taste are we happy we're happy let's put this in a bowl a inappropriately shaped bowl for really putting this sort of brothy soup into but you know i did it anyway so i'm going to struggle but i think it looks nice pretty bowl there get it in there one more bit didn't that look lovely really hearty warming similar to chowder but not chowder cullen skink a smoked haddock soup and he's absolutely gorgeous and let's dunk a bit of toast and then i'm going to hand you back over to me for the tasting all right cullen skink very similar to chowder i think just a little bit of sweet corn in this and you've got a smoked halal chowder which came first as i don't know it is quite rich that's because i used a double cream a heavy cream i think if you used a less heavy cream or even no cream at all you'd have a much lighter dish there super you know i like that and on a cold autumn evening you want your cockles warming beautiful and i would just say please don't use the dyed fish for this this dyed smoked it's not very good and it would ruin the color of the finished soup so anyway that is lovely well done scotland you come up with a nice dish and you did deep fry it progress anyway catch me the next one come real soon [Music] bye you

Channel: Uncle Matt's Cookery Lessons

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Id: YOvnPmUzy00

Length: 8min 23sec (503 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020