Extra- Corny Corn Soup | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone this is kenji and i'm making some corn soup so i have a couple of recipes for corn soup and corn chowder that i'm going to link to in the description down there um but i'm not following either of them as usual because i don't have all those ingredients on hand and i'm just gonna wing it with what i got um so starting with some butter corn and butter go well together and a couple tablespoons let me get this video going get a couple tablespoons in this pot here um and i'm just going to heat that up on low heat um so just until it's kind of melted we don't really want it to brown at all right around there is good um let's see so normally on corn soup i would use something like leeks um because i find leeks and corn go really well together so i mean leaks in general go well into soups um today what i'm gonna do is i have all these random things i got um some sliced fennel and red onion from a salad i made the other day i've got these celery sticks because um my family was uh up in napa for the weekend and we bought some celery sticks for my daughter for the car i think i got him at a gas station so i'm gonna be oh hold on a second sorry about that okay so i'm gonna use these celery sticks i had um i also got some random scallion bottoms here um i got some garlic and i got a patch chili um so you know this is almost the the combination i'm using here is almost like the sort of cajun uh holy trinity the cajun mirepoix um which is uh bell peppers onions and celery and oh my goodness i i apologize if it's if that's if i'm mixing up creole and cajun uh i probably am and i'm sure someone will correct me in the comments um i'm not gonna look it up right now but i'm probably mixing the two up um which i know i shouldn't do but uh carrots onions i'm sorry celery onions and bell peppers um this is a sort of variation on that we got celery in there this is a an actually this is not a hash chile this is a just a regular anaheim um hatch are specific are anaheims that are grown in a specific area and sort of market under a specific term that tend to be a little bit spicier than your standard sort of supermarket um or farmers market anaheim chili but that's okay because this one i don't i don't want the soup to be particularly spicy um you could use no peppers at all you could use bell pepper you could use something like a cubanelle or a shishito you could use a jalapeno or serrano if you actually do want it spicy i'm just a rough chop on that and you go fennel's a flavor i find goes nice with corn also that's all going to go in drop this up a little bit a little bit more let me grab a uh who's this guy um so these vegetables we just want to kind of soften them up the one of the recipes i'm going to link to below she uses a um a pressure cooker which actually is a great way to make corn soup if you want you'll see what i'm going to do later but there's a lot of flavor that's in the actual cobs that you know you can use to make like a corn stock and a pressure cooker is actually a really good way to extract a lot of that flavor and sort of a lot of the what's called the corn milk out of the ears um without having to simmer stock for a long time but uh today i'm just making it on this and on the stovetop because well i don't know why i just felt like it um all right some garlic cloves i'll use maybe three of these guys one two three smack smack smack um you know people sometimes ask me whether using pre-minced garlic is okay you don't need my permission to do anything if you want to use pre-minced garlic or if you've tried it in the past and you find that you enjoy the flavor then go for it personally i don't like using pre-minced garlic because you know garlic is one of those ingredients where the more processed it is to begin with the less flavor you're going to get out of in the end because a lot of the flavors are extremely volatile and they're formed immediately after you chop or or crush the garlic so you know if you really want fresh garlic flavor to come through in your food then you need to use fresh garlic there's not really any way around that you know a compromise would be some of those pre-shut pre-peeled garlic cloves that you can buy at any supermarket these days the flavor in there is never going to be as good as in unpeeled garlic because to get that garlic there they blanch it which deactivates some of its uh um deactivates and destroys some of its some of the more flavorful compounds in there so even pre-peeled garlic is not gonna have the same the same flavor as garlic that you peel and chop yourself but you know then again sometimes who cares you know you don't you don't need all that pure garlic flavor um and i'm sure there are some people in here who are gonna disagree with me but so do whatever makes you comfortable i'm not i'm not going to tell you one way is right or wrong all right so uh the rest of this these scallions i'm gonna just uh slice up to use this garnish later when i slice scallions for garlic i do what's called a back slice so if i get down and you can see um so normally what you you'll see a lot of people do is is this sort of chopping motion where you push the knife forward and down um and with a very sharp knife that's fine um but it can crush the food that you're trying to cut instead of slicing and something very delicate like scallions what i prefer to do is what i call the back slice which is where you cut on the backstroke so you put the put the blade of the knife down like this and then you slowly pull it backwards and you use you use like a very um you use the entire you know not the entire length of the knife but but a much wider length of the knife than um than you do with a forward slice and you know the more you're so you're really slicing instead of chopping um and what that ends up doing is that it gives you um much nicer slices particularly for things like um scallions and chives that can really get crushed using a more traditional typical knife stroke so that's a back slice for you i'm gonna get these guys in some water so that they stay nice and crisp and fresh until we need them later okay now the corn all right so i'm gonna shuck a few ears of corn this is this is white corn from the farmer's market you can you know you can use yellow corn white corn corn it used to be that corn um you know field this type of corn sweet corn um the the sugars in them would be very pronounced when you first picked them um and then they would quickly convert it to starches with modern you know modern varietals of corn um especially these you know super sweet corns the sugars they're bred in such a way that um that the sugars don't actually break down into starches very quickly so even you know even corn that's been picked and out of the field for a week can still taste nice and nice and sweet um these days but that said you know it's never going to be quite as sweet and flavorful as when you first pick it so we're going to take the we're going to take the kernels off here i know um alton brown does this thing with a bundt pan where you put it upside down um and it and it works um that said i don't usually feel like pulling out a bump can't pan every time i um shuck some corn so what i do is i i start cutting down like this and to avoid my knife hitting the bowl i basically get about halfway down and then lift up the corn like that and that way um you don't like smack your knife against the bowl and you know and if you have a big enough cutting board who carries up a little of the corn falls off to the side right okay so we're gonna do that with all three ears and then afterwards i'll show you what we're gonna do um the the other trick you can use um is doing something like this where you put like a little cup upside down in the center um and if you find that makes things much easier for you um go for it um you know i usually don't bother with tricks like this just for a small number of corn if i was if i was making like a giant batch of corn soup and i had like a dozen ears of corn to shuck i probably would do something like this but just like two or three years i don't i don't bother all right so got our corn again we want to all this stuff to soften but not brown [Music] looks like looks like we're getting pretty close here actually to where we want it all right um and now for the rest of this corn what we're going to do is we're going to scrape the back with a knife like this scrape it sorry scrape with the back of a knife and the idea is that we want to really extract every last bit of edible corn out of the cob and also the corn milk because that's what's going to first of all add a lot of corn flavor but also it's that sort of starchy milky liquid that comes out so you can see it all here like that kind of starchy milky liquid that's going to help thicken up the soup later on and give it a lot more body and sort of give it an almost you know dairy-like texture like a heavy cream like texture without actually having to add any heavy cream so that you really reinforce that reinforce that corniness which is something you learn to do as a dad you know one of the one of the nice things of doing this in a pressure cooker is that you can kind of skip this step all that stuff kind of gets extracted anyway through the high pressure and the higher temperature that a pressure cooker gets you um but i'm not doing any pressure today pressure cooker so yeah so all this stuff here all this like this stuff that stuff that would have that would have been left behind and you can see all right there you see that that's all that corn milk that we want to go into here um when you're when you're sauteing ingredients like this when you're sweating them out you're gonna hear a sort of distinct difference in sound between when things are sweating that is when they're sort of like actively expressing moisture versus when they start to dry and actually you know the temperature starts to go up and they actually start to fry it's sort of like it you know the difference between a kind of sputtering soft boiling simmering sound versus a sort of more of like a crackling pop that you get from frying so once you start hearing that difference you know that your vegetables are on the verge of starting to brown and so you want to stop the cooking there in this case we're going to stop the cooking by adding in our corn i'm going to get a spatula so we really get all that corn juice out of here corn milk [Music] all right okay now what i'm going to do is i'm going to break the cobs up kind of nestle them down in there and then i'm going to go over and add some water and so essentially you know you could if i was doing this in a restaurant what i would do is i would make a separate stock out of corn out of the corn cobs i would make a corn stock out of the corn cobs and other sort of fresh aromatic vegetables so leeks onions um probably a little bit of fennel um some bay leaf some herbs maybe some tarragon in there which goes nicely with corn i would make a separate stock but in this case this is just home cooking i'm just going to um bring this all up to a simmer and uh and then we're gonna let it go for about 15 minutes and that's about it um okay so you know what i'm gonna do i'm gonna say simmer sesame all right so we're at a little simmer here now um i'm gonna let this go for about oh i added a couple bay leaves by the way while the camera is off i'm gonna let this go for about 15 minutes um it doesn't hurt to let it go longer you could let it go for up to like 45 minutes or so you know past that you're not really going to be extracting much more flavor but i'd say around 15 minutes is sort of the minimum amount you want to go to make sure that the vegetables are cooked through and that you've extracted a good amount of flavor from those corn cobs um in the meantime the other thing i'm doing over here is that i am slowly rendering out some this is pepperoni um i find you know spiced pork products go really well um our cured pork goes really well with corn um so i'm gonna use this as a garnish this is just literally pep a pepperoni stick that i cut into little triangles quartered lengthwise cut into little triangles um and i'm now just frying in its own fat no added oil here um if you wanted you could do something like a spanish chorizo you could do bacon you could do um ham if you're doing ham you'd probably need to add a little bit of extra fat but any kind of cured pork would go great with corn soup um and if you don't you know if you don't eat meat the other thing you could do is take some olive oil um and infuse it with a bit of paprika um smoked paprika is great actually um so just simmer you know put some olive oil on the stovetop uh put a little bit of smoked paprika in it uh bring it up until it sizzles a little bit and then shut it off and uh it will turn into this beautiful bright red oil that you can then use to um garnish your uh your soup in fact i'm gonna pull out a little bit of uh i'm gonna put a pull out a little bit of smoked paprika here just to add to that pepperoni um just just to sort of reinforce that flavor where's my smoked paprika smoked paprika smoked paprika there's ah nope where's my smoked paprika black garlic oh here we are [Applause] spicy regular i have no idea how this opens ah there you go there's a brand new bottle [Applause] hmm all right i'm gonna snap and it's gonna be open ready thank you magic of magic of shutting off the camera and turning it back on again all right i'm gonna add a little bit of smoked paprika to this oil just to give it a little bit a little bit of smokey flavor a little bit more color and i've just the pepperoni is about as crispy as i want it so shut off the heat put my paprika in there just gonna let that infuse as it cools down um and then we'll be ready to go all right i will see you all back again in just about 15 minutes okay so our soup is just about ready to puree so the last thing i'm going to do is i'm going to pull out those um i'm going to pull out those bay leaves and this bent corn cobs you know while i do this i'm going to i'm going to quickly gripe about one thing so this is this burner is a um an induction burner from um breville and polyscience called the control freak it's wonderful um the thing that the one gripe i have about it and this is this this ties into a question that i get a lot from people which is um asking about what temperature i cook certain things at they are asking for specific temperatures on a pan um temperature is only useful in an oven it's not useful um really it's not really that useful on a pan surface because temperature the way things cook are affected not just by the temperature but also by the pan material what you really care about on a pan is um not temperature but you care about heat flux so like the the heat that's going in versus the heat that's coming out um and that's that's what's going to translate to different types of cooking um so on this on this burner you can adjust both both the flux which is the slow medium and fast that's how fast energy is being pumped into the pan um and you can set the temperature so right now this is set this is when you when you turn it to what to a set temperature of 240 degrees they call that a simmer but it's not really a simmer because a simmer um is not a specific temperature it can be a range of temperatures but really what a simmer is is when um the energy that's going into a pan uh the the net input is um it just at the right level such that um steam water is converting to steam at a very low rate that's what a simmer is it's not it's not a specific temperature certainly it's not 240 degrees because your water added water at a simmer even water at a boil is never going to get to 240 degrees um you can see it's at 210 right now and that's sort of a fast of what a fast simmer would be um so on this burner when i want to simmer i set it to slow and then i set the temperature anywhere above you know 212 degrees and it's going to basically be a fast simmer anyhow that's my little gripe simmer is not a temperature it's a measure of heat flux all right and net heat in and out okay so um now i'm going to blend this [Music] the easy way in the pan if you really want like a super smooth puree you can do it in a blender in fact you know what maybe i'll show you you've seen me blend things with a hand blender before maybe i'll do this in an actual blender just to show you how in a restaurant how a so-called professional cook would um blend a hot soup to make it smooth so i got a real powerful blender here this is a vitamix vitamix and blendtec those are sort of the two name um two names in the game when it comes to um high-powered blenders i use a vitamix just because i have always used one and i like how the controls are analog not digital um fewer things tend to go wrong with analog controls i'm also just sort of used to working with it but i've also had experience with blendtec blenders and those are real nice too um all right so when you're pureeing hot foods the trick is you don't want to start covering it so what can happen is um you have food that's on the verge of boiling um so it's letting off steam so when you when you create a vortex suddenly you're creating lots of vegetation and you're also increasing the surface area so what can happen is steam can form very rapidly and if you seal the top here that rapidly produced steam can blow the top off the blender and then you get soup all over your ceiling uh so what you do is you put a towel on top like that and you hold it and then you want to start at the lowest possible setting so in this case that's very low and from there slowly build up that way you don't have that real sudden burst of steam that comes [Music] once you're at high you can just do that now in true restaurant fashion i'm also going to emulsify some butter into there a few more tablespoons for that whole pot just to really give it some extra richness and i haven't yet seasoned this with any salt so i know it's going to need that in this case i'm not gonna put any pepper in there if i was gonna put pepper i would use white pepper just to maintain the color um but i don't think it's gonna need pepper because it was pretty all those vegetables are going to season it pretty well you know what else you can use i think you can use just a touch of sweetness the corn is pretty sweet but i'm gonna add just a touch of honey to it to sort of accentuate that accentuate that corn sweetness yeah that's perfect um i should have slowly ramped down the hit and ramped it down just the same way that i ripped it up to avoid that little ploop that came out but there it is um and now if you really want like a super smooth restaurant style puree what you do oh here you grab one of these a shinwa um this shin why i have is like real old 20 years old i've had it for a long time um super fine mesh strainer this is fine a finer much strainer than um you know then your typical sort of this is what most people would refer to as a fine mesh strainer this is much finer than that and this is really going to get you sort of that velvety smooth puree now because it's so fine purees have trouble passing through it there's a couple ways to get it through the first is to get a implement like this and just wrap it like that and it should start coming through the other the other method you can use which um is better generally for sort of thicker purees so you wouldn't necessarily need it on a soup like this um but for thicker purees as you get a well you would get a ladle but i don't seem to have one right now maybe they're all in the dishwasher what you would do is you would get a ladle and kind of push it up and down like this and that really gets it going through fast as well but for for a thin soup like this the wrap method works just fine and there you go you're left with the kind of fibrous bits that are going to interfere with that super smooth texture but you know if you want them you can always push them through like this um a ladle makes it easier to do all right i'm gonna call that done you don't need any of this stuff in there um and yeah now we're ready to eat so let me get a bowl this soup by the way delicious as is also delicious served um cold chilled so i will actually probably eat some of this right now for lunch and then put the rest in the fridge after it cools down and my family will eat it cold for either dinner tonight or lunch tomorrow all right there's that there's this crispy pepperoni which i think goes wonderfully with corn and some of that smoked paprika and pepperoni oil then just some scallions garnished on top that is done so creamy corn soup pepperoni oil scallions let's try some hot delicious and summery all right everyone guys gals non-binary pals i will see you next time bye i

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 302,383

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Id: wbr_adqILas

Length: 25min 47sec (1547 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020