Simple Mushroom Soup

hey everyone it's kenji uh i am here at my new home still a bit of a mess because we still don't have all of our shelves but i'm making some mushroom soup so i thought i would um show you how i'm doing that um so this is a super simple mushroom soup you know mushroom soup could get a little more complicated than this but we're going with just basic um cremini mushrooms here you could use um um you know white button mushrooms or you can use a mix of mushrooms um you know like at a fancy restaurant you might make uh like a chanterelle soup um or a morel soup and you the basic process is exactly the same um you're gonna be cleaning your mushrooms um cooking them with some broth um some dairy and then pureeing it so it's real it's a really easy process um mushrooms like this when you buy them from the store um typically they don't really need much washing because they're you know they're cultivated and they're actually pretty clean if you see a little bit of dirt on them you can rub it off dirt off with your fingers um you could wipe it off with a um a damp paper towel you know wild mushrooms um the kind of mushrooms you might get at a fancy restaurant or a fancy sort of gourmet shop you might have to give them a little bit more of a clean um so typically you would do that with a damp paper towel or with a special mushroom brush um i doubt most of you have mushroom i mean i don't even have a mushroom brush at home but um with the uh you know supermarket mushrooms you don't really need to so little bits of dirt like that you can pick off with your fingers if your mushrooms come looking real dirty you can feel free to wash them there's this myth that there's this myth that you can't wash mushrooms because they'll absorb water which is not really true a little bit of water will cling to their surfaces but it'll evaporate off pretty quickly anyway so you can totally wash your mushrooms spin them dry in a salad spinner and go that way um i'm slicing my mushrooms um an easier way to do this or you know if you've got a little kid who wants to do mushrooms one nice way to do mushrooms for especially for a soup like this where we're going to puree it and we want it kind of chunky just take the mushroom like this and squash it it'll uh you know a kid can do it you can do it just break it up it'll cook basically the same in fact i don't even know why i was chopping those squash with your hands break them up that's all you need to do that'll work for any kind of sort of really um you know mushroom application where it's going to be sort of either pureed or finely minced so you can make like a duck cell like this if you really break it up with your finger like you know i'm sure you've always all seen beef wellington photos or videos um where you coat the beef with a mushroom mixture um you can make your duck sell like that if you're not trying to impress anyone all right mushrooms i'm gonna just saute them with some butter um this is about 12 ounces of mushrooms i i'll link to like an exact recipe i have for this and i think i have another video even where i'm making a more sort of precise version of this but you know as you know i very rarely follow recipes um even my own recipes when i'm cooking um i see them more sort of a guideline once you sort of understand how they work all right gonna melt some butter you could use olive oil if you want um and so what we're making today is sort of technically um i think you would call it a veloute which is a um you know one of the french mother sauces so um a veloute is basically a stock that's thickened with a roux um and so this is a mushroom veloute so what we're gonna do is we're gonna saute these mushrooms down in butter i'm going this is relatively high heat right now um just you're going to see mushrooms expel a lot of moisture early on and you kind of got to evaporate all that moisture before you can get any kind of significant browning on them so i'm going on high heat right now once the mushrooms start really cooking i might turn it down a little bit if i'm not able to sort of super pay attention to them um and stay here stirring constantly because i don't want them to burn but i'll probably be able to get away with going high heat the whole time all right so this is about 12 ounces of mushrooms a little salt some pepper [Music] all right we're gonna let that start [Music] cooking down a bit actually i will turn it down just a bit because it seems to be sizzling a little harder than i wanted to all right now over here i have to work on my other ingredients um now alliums i got a leak here which is just kind of languishing in my fridge which is why i'm using it you can do an onion um you don't have to do leeks you could do a shallot um if you're gonna be making stock soon you could save these leak greens and stick them in your stock but i'm not so i'm composting it um so leeks often they grow in really sandy soil and often they'll have um a bit of sand this one looks pretty clean actually but they'll have some sand caught up in their fronds so what you do is you split them in half run them under the sink like this clean them out i'm going to split them into quarters and then just into the chunks like this um oh people have asked me what this knife is um right now all of my knives are in a box um and in fact actually just today um i got my new magnetic knife racks um so i'm gonna be using a whole series of of these guys that i'm gonna stick up here um and perhaps along another wall somewhere to hang all my knives but right now the only knife i have in my kitchen is this um uh usable knife i have in the kitchen is this uh chinese style um chef's knife um it looks similar to a western cleaver um you could probably even call it a chinese cleaver but it's really used for vegetable i mean it's sort of the all-purpose chinese chef's knife not not as heavy as a western style cleaver and it gets nice and sharp this one is from a company called shibazi you can get that for around 45 bucks online very good deal you know these kinds of knives they take a little bit of getting used to if you're not used to using a bigger knife like this but i enjoy them i think it's a good knife definitely good night for the um for the money one of the nice things about chinese cleavers is that they allow you to do things like minced garlic really fast ready watch this and we have minced garlic don't need to be too precise with the mincing anyway because we're going to be again sort of sauteing and blending this all down all right so those are my um alliums there i'm gonna get some thyme as well um i'm not gonna be super again not super precise about picking out every little fine stem um because well it'll get blended um one of the restaurants i used to work at uh it used to be the the server's job to um the server's job to pick all the individual time leaves off of the um the time stems because none of the cooks like to do it which in retrospect it's kind of just lazy huh making someone else do your job anyhow i didn't really think about it much time because i wasn't in charge all right we got some time and if you if you're being real lazy about it you don't even have to pick these off what you can do actually is just take the whole um sprig and when we're simmering the soup down you can take the entire sprig um and just chuck it in the soup and then before you blend it pull it out um so that you get all the flavor and some of the leaves will fall off too but you get all the flavor out of it and then you pull it out before the um before you blend it so that you get the stem out of there all right this is going to take probably you know mushrooms take a good while to brown properly so this is going to take probably about i'd say five more minutes at this heat you know depending on your range top it could take anywhere from five minutes to 15 minutes but i'm going to sit here and stir for a little bit we're making a very small portion of this question this is basically just for me and my wife and my toddler um and none of us are huge eaters so um this is a small portion um the actual recipe i have published um will serve you know four to six people and i think that calls for two pounds of mushrooms so more than twice this much anyhow all right i will sit here and babysit the mushrooms and i'll be back in just about five minutes um so you can see these mushrooms are starting to brown all their there's no more liquid um at the bottom all the liquids evaporating so they're really starting to sizzle um you can also see they're starting to stick to the bottom a little bit um if you're if that happens when you're sauteing in fact when you're sauteing virtually anything if it starts to look a little bit dry like that um you can add a little splash of oil or butter you know i could add butter i'm gonna go with some olive oil because it's easier and i have it right there um just so that it moistens up and you're really making sure that everything is cooking evenly um you know there's a few exceptions for that so for instance if you're sauteing eggplant um it'll really absorb the oil at the beginning and then start to expel the oil again so if you add more oil when eggplant looks dry it'll make everything super greasy but for the most part you know whether you're sauteing onions or greens or anything um anything like that if it looks dry just feel free to add a little bit more oil all right so these mushrooms are nice and brown now i'm going to add in my allium so my leeks garlic my thyme um you don't have to use time by the way time i think you know it kind of naturally pairs with mushrooms because they i don't know they both are kind of woodsy they seem to pair nicely to me but you could use something like sage you could use marjoram you could use savory you could use parsley rosemary whatever whatever you feel like honestly mushrooms won't care [Music] they're easy going they're easygoing fun guys all right [Music] i'm gonna lower the heat a little bit so that nothing burns we really want those um leeks and garlic to just kind of soften and not brown too much because we don't want that sort of added sweetness of caramelized onion sugars or leek sugars um i've got some parsley out which i'm just going to garnet use to garnish the soup when it's done all right so next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to add a little bit of flour so this is a veloute which means that it's thickened with flour so for this amount of onion of mushroom i'm going to add about a tablespoon maybe a little more about a tablespoon of flour i'm also going to add just a touch more butter because it is looking a little dry still we want to make sure that butter cooks evenly um so after this what i'm going to do is i'm going to add some stock to it um if you happen to have in your pantry or you're out of the supermarket and you feel like it if you haven't have some dried mushrooms reconstituting dried mushrooms in stock what i would do is i would take some of those dried mushrooms maybe you know a quarter ounce of them or half ounce of them put them in a microwave-safe container cover them with a couple cups of stock and then microwave it until the stock is really hot and then sort of let it sit there and steep like tea then you can drain out those reconstituted dried mushrooms saute them along with your fresh mushrooms and save that stock as the base for your soup and you'll sort of really reinforce that mushroom flavor dried mushroom centerpiece super concentrated in flavor um i would recommend something like porcini or maybe um if you want shiitake you know they have a sort of distinct flavor to them shiitake maitake would be great too but porcini would sort of be my dried mushroom of choice dried morels are also great all right that's looking good now i'm going to take some sherry optional you could use also use sort of chinese wine or you could use regular old white wine i'm adding about a an end of a bottle to it half a cup maybe and with that we're gonna scrape scrape scrape scrape this is called deglazing and what we're trying to do is we're trying to get those browned bits off the bottoms off the bottom and sides of the pan um because those have those are packed with flavor those brown bits and we want that all to make it into our soup all right now some chicken broth you can use store-bought or homemade um i always get low sodium just because i like to have control over the seasoning in my dish so it's low-sodium chicken broth is always a good bet as opposed to the uh the regular stuff um so for this amount of mushrooms i'm probably gonna add maybe two cups or so then i'm going to add about a half cup of milk or maybe one cup of milk just a little dairy not not a ton if you want to keep this totally vegan by the way you can i'm at um at my restaurant at worst hall we used to make um all of our soups were were vegan so we would make vegetable stocks and we made a mushroom soup using um uh just vegetable stock you don't need to add any dairy at all um just use olive oil to saute the mushrooms vegetable stock all right so now i'm gonna let this simmer um i don't uh do i have any baileys yeah i do have some bay leaves i'll get some i'll get a couple bay leaves in there all right i can't remember where where are my bailey's out here everything's new here for me get some lemon juice for the end all right so i'm going to let this come up to a um come up to a boil reduce it to a bare bear simmer and then let it cook for just a couple minutes just so that bay leaf can infuse some of its flavor and so everything can sort of get get to know each other in there um all right so i will be back in just about four more minutes um all right so everything's simmered down um you can get this let this go longer if you want you will get a little more flavor out of it but um lunch is lunchtime is almost ready here so i'm just gonna speed it up all right pop that bay leaf out bring out our trusty friend the hand blender um you don't have to use a hand blender of course you can use a regular blender um or even a food processor or you can keep it as chunky like this if you if you don't mind um it's going to be perfectly delicious just like this but i'm going to take a little bit take a second to just lightly puree it heat up so i don't melt my cord i've melted many cords on these hand blenders especially at restaurants like where your burners are just kind of always on all right so how um how chunky do we want this maybe a tiny bit more you can also you know make this sort of silky smooth and that's that's delicious too all up to you okay that looks good to me for now toss this guy in the sink um and now let's give it a taste and see uh see what we need to taste with these guys mmm yum all right a little bit of salt a little bit more pepper um i'm gonna a little splash of lemon juice not much lemon juice um you know you'll find that after salt acid is the most sort of important seasoning you know not all foods require acid in the way that sort of all foods require salt but um often times if you find that your soup or your food is not sort of bright popping in your mouth the way you want it to um it's because it needs a little bit of acid all right let's use our french onion soup pots i don't know why all right parsley nice rustic chop on it and there we go this is like a i don't know how long that took total maybe 15-20 minutes super simple and delicious mushroom veloute i'm gonna finish it with some parsley get the good olive oil just love it you know what i'll do just for kicks because i have it around i'm gonna pull out the end of a truffle i had from new year's truffle and mushrooms of course go well they're all fungi this is black truffle by no means a necessary ingredient for delicious mushroom soup but if you got it why not right all right truffles um they actually grow in the pacific northwest um you know not these perigord truffles and the french truffles and the italian white truffles are sort of the really prized ones but um there are truffles in the pacific northwest which is where i live now um so i'm probably going to be going out truffle hunting and maybe i'll try and share some of that with you um here we go all right delicious mushroom veloute hmm oh god that truffle as soon as it hits um as soon as it hits that hot soup and it kind of the aroma starts wafting up i love truffle i know some people don't like it but i love it hot right this a little bit of sourdough perfect meal all right guys gals number binary pals thank you for joining me stay safe wear a mask um i hope everyone is going to have a good new year i'm a good better 2021 than a better than 2020 um love you all see you later bye-bye hey everyone it's kenji there are 22 million kids in this country that rely on school lunches for nutritious meals and with schools closed now more than ever organizations like no kid hungry can use their support so i'm asking you to join me uh click the link in the description below to donate some money no amount is too small or too big thank you very much and stay safe bye [Music] you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 408,407

Rating: 4.9644327 out of 5

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Id: vgIplQn92gU

Length: 21min 51sec (1311 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TowerRock]

Simple mushroom soup, complete with truffles the simplest of all mushrooms. 🤣