Categories
Breakfast and Brunch The Book

144. Coffee Coffee Cake with Espresso Glaze p.644


The recipe

I brought this cake to a brunch at a friend’s last spring. I’m going to have a difficult time giving it a fair rating, because I had horrible seasonal allergies and couldn’t taste anything. I barely remember the brunch, and had to leave after about an hour. My head was so muddled that I’d forgotten my camera, and had to borrow the hosts. He sent me the photos recently, and I’ve been trying to piece this dish back together. The recipe is found in the Breakfast and Brunch section, but it could certainly work for a dinner party.

I should say to anyone reading this that actually attended the brunch, that even though I was feeling awful and sneezing with abandon, I was scrupulous about leaving the room to sneeze, and washing my hands thoroughly before touching your food. I really hate to cook when I’m sick, and definitely worry about contaminating people. I’m not sure how paranoid that actually is though. People who work in restaurants go to work sick all the time, it’s not something we like to think about, but it’s true. If Anthony Bourdain is to be believed they also go to work high, blood splattered, and vomiting, and we’re generally all right. I have a lot of faith in the awesomeness of the human immune system, and the abilities of heat to kill off the nasty stuff that’s gotten into our food. That doesn’t mean I’m willing to take a chance with someone else’s health though.

The recipe followed a fairly standard cake method, mix the dry ingredients, flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, in a bowl, then cream butter and sugar in another bowl, add eggs, and vanilla. Then, add the dry ingredients, and sour cream, in alternate batches to the wet ingredients. You then separate 1/3 of the mixture, and add barely dissolved instant espresso to it. You then layer the light and dark batters in a buttered bundt pan and bake for about an hour. Once the cake is unmolded and cooled, you cover it with an espresso glaze made with instant espresso powder, strong brewed coffee (I used a shot of espresso), and confectioners sugar.

I did eat a piece of this cake, but I have no idea what it tasted like. The bitterness of the coffee was the only flavour that managed to cut through the fuzzy sock coating my tongue. Since it’s from The Book, I’m willing to to out on a limb and say that it was probably too sweet. It had a very appealing texture though, moist, with a big fluffly crumb. My dining companion remembers this cake fondly, and it was well received at the brunch. Most of it had disappeared by the time I crawled home to bed. Since people praised it at the time, and brought it up weeks later, it can’t have been bad. The recipe is found in the Breakfast and Brunch section, but it could certainly work for a dinner party. If I didn’t have so many other recipes to get to, I’d make it again, just to find out what it was really like.

I’ll give it an estimated rating of

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

143. Fried Oysters Rémoulade p.329


The instructions for the oyster’s don’t appear online, but the rémoualde is the same one used in this recipe.

I tried a fried oyster for the first time about six months ago at a very posh restaurant. It was brought out as an unexpected treat between courses, and served with a fiery salsa. It had a crackling exterior that gave way with a burst of the the ocean, and revealed a delicately chewy, and still mostly raw oyster. We ate some wonderful food that night, but I think the impromptu oyster was my favourite part. I was hoping to match that experience with this recipe. In then end I didn’t quite succeed, but it’s a strong base for further experimentation.

For this recipe shucked oysters are dredged in a mixture of milk and egg, then coated with crushed saltine crackers. The oysters are deep fried for a couple of minutes, and served on their shells and topped with a rémoulade. The rémoulade is a simple mixture of mayonnaise, mustard, tomato paste, minced shallot, dill pickles, and scallion, with a dash of Worchestershire sauce, old bay seasoning, minced parsley, sugar, red wine vinegar, and a pinch of cayenne.

The rémoulade is absolutely excellent, and I’ll hear no word against it. It draws in a broad spectrum of ingredients, and covers its bases. It’s creamy, acidic, herbaceous, arromatic, and just a little bit spicy. It would be an ideal counterpoint to many simply flavoured seafood dishes. The use of Old Bay seasoning was intriguing. The Book doesn’t often call for prepared spices, particularly not a proprietary blend like Old Bay. I’d never tried the stuff before, and never seen it in stores here. Alton Brown is apparently in love with it, and I’d been interested to find out what the fuss was about. I was lucky to be cooking at my parent’s place, as it turned out my mother had a container in her pantry. Speculating on how old it was, would have been looking a gift horse in the mouth. I wasn’t blown away by Old Bay, but it certainly wasn’t bad. I was expecting it to be like those flavoured salts Food Network stars like to sell, but it seems to be more of an herb and spice blend. It was a worthwhile experience, but I’m not sure I’ll add it as a pantry staple.

The oysters in this recipe had some problems. I heated the oil to 375, and began the frying process. The recipe says they should cook for one-and-a-half to two minutes, but after about 45 seconds they were getting quite dark. By the time I got the oysters out they were much closer to mahogany than golden. The previous oyster recipe called for large oysters, so it was my fault when they overcooked, this one just calls for oysters in general. We have no way of knowing what size of oysters they tested this recipe on, but they must have been larger than mine. When there’s such wild variation in the sizes and cooking times of oysters, it’s pretty bad form not to give some indication of how that will affect the recipe. My oysters came out overcooked on the outside, which wasn’t a big deal, but they were cooked all the way through and mostly dried out on the inside. The fine texture of the oyster was lost, and replaced by chewiness. They still had good flavour, and the coating was nicely crisp. I’d certainly try oysters like this again, but I’d be sure to get them out of the oil significantly earlier.

These would work well at a cocktail party, or as a first course. The book suggests that they could be a main course as well, but I think they were a bit too rich to make a meal of. This recipe had its problems, but overall they were very enjoyable. With a little tweaking of the oysters and cooking time I think they could have been fantastic.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

142. Oysters Rockefeller p.52


This recipe from Epicurious is similar to The Book’s version, but the linked recipe has slightly different proportions, and makes twice as much topping. I didn’t read the recipe very thoroughly, and used little Malpeque oysters for the recipe, instead of the “large” oysters the recipe called for, so I had more than enough topping.

We used to get Oysters Rockefeller about once a year as children. My parents would pick up a case of Oysters for themselves, or get a few cases and invite friends over for an oyster party. Us kids were totally grossed out by raw oysters, and dared one another to try slurping them. Inevitably one of us would take the bet, and then gag on the slippery salty oyster, and spit it into the sink. My parents quickly realized this game was a waste of precious oysters, and started making Oysters Rockefeller for us, which we devoured. As I grew up I came around on the raw oyster, and ended up preferring them raw with just a little squeeze of lemon juice, or a dash of hot sauce.

During my late teens and early twenties I was a volunteer firefighter, and our department had an oyster and beer bash every fall. Mostly people came to the party to shuck and slurp raw oysters at long tables all night long, but we prepared oyster soup and oysters Rockefeller too. I would spend the afternoon shucking oysters and saving the prettiest shells. I never got the department’s recipe, but they did an especially fine version of the oyster Rockefeller. Even though I prefer my oysters without adulterations, I certainly wouldn’t say no to one.

Unfortunately this recipe doesn’t live up to either my Mother’s or the department’s version. Using the wrong oysters threw the whole recipe out of whack, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. You start by making a mixture of chopped Boston lettuce, baby spinach, scallions, parsley, celery, garlic, and bread crumbs. You then wilt this mixture in a skillet with butter, and add Pernod, anchovy paste, cayenne, salt, and pepper. The mixture is allowed to cool, while you crisp and crumble some bacon. You then add an oyster and some of it’s liquor to a cleaned oyster shell, top with some of the vegetable mixture, bacon, and more bread crumbs. The oysters then get stabilized on a bed of salt crystals, and go into a 450 oven for 16 – 18 minutes.

My main criticism of the recipe is that there were way too many bread crumbs. The crumbs soaked up all of the oyster liquor, and overwhelmed the oysters with their sandy texture. Even if I’d used gigantic Pacific oysters that would have been a problem. Using the smaller oysters also meant that they were overcooked and dry by the time the the tops were browned. Unfortunately my little oysters got completely lost under a mountain of spinach and bread crumbs. I could almost detect a hint of the sea in this dish, and I thought I found the oyster in a couple of them, but it could have been a clump of bread crumbs. Given the excess of topping, I was surprised at the lack of bacon, you could easily have doubled it without going overboard.

Done right, oysters Rockefeller have a just barely set oyster, with a good deal of liquor left at the bottom, and a flavourful crunchy topping. They can compliment and accentuate the oyster, leaving it as the star of the show. My oysters were, dry, didn’t taste like oysters, and didn’t even try to compensate with bacon. It’s hard to give the recipe a fair rating, because I messed things up. I’m sure that the topping had too little bacon, and too many bread crumbs, I would have liked the anise flavour of the Pernod to come through a little more clearly as well. My final product didn’t taste too bad, but I would have saved an hour, and enjoyed myself more if I’d just slurped the oysters raw.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

141. Roasted Red Pepper and Eggplant Dip p.10


The recipe

I served this dip along with the tapenade from the other day, and was similarly underwhelmed. This dip had a bland, mushy flavour, that didn’t really do much for anyone. I mentioned that the tapenade was overpowering, and this helped thin it out. Unfortunately, “dilutes tapenade” is one of the better things I have to say about this dip.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the ingredient list here. You could probably make a fine dip with eggplant, red pepper, olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, jalapeño, salt, and pepper. Unfortunately the cooking instructions sabotage the goodness of these ingredients. Basically you roast eggplant and red peppers, remove the skins, and purée the flesh with the rest of the ingredients. You then transfer the purée back to the stove top, and simmer it for another 20 odd minutes to get rid of excess water.

Roasting the eggplant and red peppers sounds like a good idea to me, but the recipe falls apart from there on. You end up taking all of these pungent aromatic ingredients, garlic, lemon juice, jalapeño, and extra-virgin olive oil and killing them by simmering them. Raw garlic and chiles work wonderfully in dips, and I don’t see any need to cook them at all. If you want to mellow the harsh edges, then consider building extra flavours by roasting the garlic cloves, or at least mincing and browning in oil. Garlic cooked with wet methods takes on an unpleasant kind of metallic taste, and gives up the sharp potency and fruitiness of it’s raw form. The jalapeño would similarly benefit from some dry heat to bring out the smokiness. Cooking extra-virgin olive oil and lemon juice is just insanity, uncooked they’re complex and full of layers and interest. Heat them beyond a certain point, and the lemon juice is just an acid, and your nuanced grassy, fruity, olive oil becomes indistinguishable from canola.

What kills me about this recipe is that the murder of all those flavours is totally unnecessary. You could easily make a purée of just the eggplant and red peppers, simmer that, and then add the rest of the ingredients. The texture was one of the highlights of the dip though, smooth, silky, and nicely emulsified, so it’s probably worth getting rid of at least some excess water.

The recipe says that the dip needs to come together in the refrigerator for at least a day. I served it about 6 hours after making it, and was disappointed by it’s blandness and lack of personality. I figured it just needed to rest longer, but it was still going nowhere and doing nothing for me by the second day. I eventually got rid of the leftovers by integrating them into a pizza sauce.

I should say that my dining companion liked this dip, and enjoyed that it mostly tasted like eggplant and red pepper, with a mild background of other flavours. I’m definitely biased towards big bold flavours in a dip, and I missed them. Subtle dips can stray too easily over into baby-food territory, which is not for me. The Epicurious reviews suggest that this is a love it or hate it recipe, so our disagreement isn’t unusual. This recipe has the makings of a nice dip, but at least to my palate it was a failure.

Categories
Sauces and Salsas The Book

140. Tapenade p.890


No recipe is online for this one.

I’m never sure what to do with tapenade. I like it, but it’s far too salty to eat all on its own. I’ve used it as an accompaniment to grilled meats and fish, served it with cheese, spread it on sandwiches, or used it as an accent to hummus, but I’m never quite satisfied. It’s been OK the couple of times dishes have called for it, but it’s rarely something I would seek out. That’s kind of odd because I love olives and eat them often. Most of the time, I’d rather just eat an olive than spread tapenade on something. Way back in the beginning of the project I wrote about the Olive and Eggplant Spread, which is like a tapenade, but cut with roasted eggplant. That was thoroughly enjoyable, and mild enough to eat without any accompaniment.

Although I’m not sure what to use it for, this tapenade was pretty good. The recipe is short and sweet, blend Kalamata olives, garlic, and capers, then add olive oil in a slow stream ’till it’s smooth. The recipe calls for pitted olives, but I’m biased against them. Maybe it’s just me being superstitious, but I feel like pitted olives are often of lower quality than the whole ones. Whether or not there’s any basis to that, but I almost always buy whole olives and pit them myself.

This tapenade was all about bold flavours working together. The olives, garlic, and capers have very strong and distinctive flavours, but they’re tied together by the fruity floral undertones they share. If any one of those flavours had been missing the dish would have fallen apart. Unfortunately this tapenade was insanely salty, all tapenades are salty, but this went further. It could have been my olives, but more than likely it was the capers. I really enjoyed the extra flavour the capers brought to the tapenade, but it would have been nice if they’d come without the salt. It’s one of the things that bothers me about tapenade in general. The things is tastes best with, often tend to be salty themselves, and that can push the salt quotient past pleasure into revulsion.

On the day I made this I served it with hummus, cheese, and a few other dips. It was fine, and people ate a fair amount of it, but it wasn’t the star of the show by any means. I used a bit of the leftovers with some grilled chicken, but left most of it on my plate. The rest mouldered in the fridge ’till we had to throw it out. Other than the salt there was absolutely nothing wrong with this tapenade, and a lot of things right about it. But, it just didn’t appeal to me all that much.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

139. “La Brea Tar Pit” Chicken Wings p.55


The recipe

I’m really ambivalent about this recipe. My wings were delicious, but the recipe is horrible. Basically you combine soy, red wine, sugar, and ginger and bring it to a boil, then pour it over chicken wings in a roasting pan and bake at 400 for 45 minutes, flip them, and cook for another hour-ish. It’s supposed to result in a thick, tar-like coating for the wings. It actually starts to burn about half an hour into the cooking and completely ruins a baking sheet. I’m not the only one to have run into this problem, the Epicurious comments are full of complaints. However the author of this recipe, Metta Miller, wrote on the boards as well. She says

Hello all, Sorry our kitchen whiz north of the border found these to be vile. If you follow my original instructions (Gourmet altered the recipe) they will be delicious every time…..To the salt sensitive: Use low-sodium soy sauce. To those concerned about burnt pans/sauce: Bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes; turn and check after another 30-45 minutes. I’ve been making these wings this way for years and haven’t ended up with a single ruined pan — or a single complaint — yet. Good luck!

The recipe as written in The Book is atrocious. The cooking time is way too long, and it’s too hot. The soy-wine-sugar-ginger sauce set up into a lava-rock like caramel that wouldn’t come off my pan despite soaking, scrubbing, vinegar, steel wool, and boiling water. It was also giving off huge volumes of black sticky smoke, and set off the fire alarm.

I was convinced the wings were ruined, but I pulled them out and transfered them to another baking dish. I scraped up the sauce that hadn’t burnt, and diluted it with water, then stuck the wings and sauce back into the oven at a lower temperature, and periodically added more water. After about an hour and half total cooking time the wings were tender with a nice crispy exterior.

I was using some very nice free range chicken wings, which make a huge difference. I’m not in a position to eat free range chicken all the time, but free range wings are cheap, and it makes a world of difference. They’re so much meatier and more flavourful than the other kind. The sauce was probably quite different from what the book intended, because I lost more than half of it, and kept diluting what remained, it never thickened or resembled a tar pit. It ended up as a nice caramelized glaze, with wonderful flavour. The wine worked with the soy and ginger remarkably well. I was surprised that they didn’t particularly taste like Chinese chicken wings, they were just delicious, in fact they were among the best wings I’ve ever had. They were certainly salty enough, and I’m willing to bet that the fully sauced version would have been inedibly salty, I’d definitely follow the authors low-sodium soy recommendation.

I absolutely believe that Metta Miller’s original version of this recipe makes some fantastic wings, and the wings I managed to salvage from this debacle of a recipe were delightful. However the recipe itself is inexcusable. If I was in a more charitable mood I might have considered the potential of the recipe to be great, but I’m feeling spiteful. This recipe ruined one of my favorite baking sheets, and that’s a transgression I’ll not soon forget. If I’d continued to follow the recipe as written it would not have resulted in food, and there’s only one possible rating for not-food. “La Brea Tar Pit” Chicken Wings have earned the first zero mushroom rating of the project.

Categories
The Project

Great News


Now that we’ve had a chance to tell close friends in person, I can tell you wonderful people who follow The Project, that my dining companion has agreed to become my wife. I proposed on New Year’s Eve up in the mountains, at the ski cabin we were staying in. We were about to sit down to a beef tenderloin feast her father had spent the afternoon preparing, and I pulled her out onto the balcony and proposed. After establishing that, yes I was serious, and no, this wasn’t a joke, she said yes.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

138. Macaroni and Cheese p.223


The recipe

I haven’t eaten all that much macaroni and cheese since I graduated to shoes with laces, but most of the kids I knew, and the stoners they grew up to be, loved the stuff from the box. As a child, macaroni and cheese was just the brand neutral way of saying your mom was making Kraft Dinner. I decided that KD was not for me around age 5, and looked for creative ways to avoid it, or mask its flavour. For reference, cut up hot dogs made it better, ketchup made it worse. Unfortunately kids in Montreal ate a lot of KD in the ’80s. My mom accepted my quirks and stopped serving it to me, but I still ate a lot of it at friends houses.

I was well pleased to leave mac and cheese behind me by the time I reached high school, and it stayed that way ’till a a nice Southern girl introduced me to the home made version in my early 20’s. Her macaroni and cheese was an entirely different animal, using real cheese, building flavour and texture with a roux, adding a touch of heat, and baking the whole thing with some extra cheese on top. I came around, and macaroni and cheese became something worth looking forward to.

I started experimenting with my own versions of mac and cheese, without much success. The problem I was trying to solve was that M&C is inherently rich, bland, and straightforward. Some people interpret that as a food surrogate for mother’s love, but I find it a bit dull. I tried adding herbs to the M&C, which fubared it, adding more chili flakes didn’t help either. One version with chipotles was actually pretty good, and worth revisiting sometime. Drawing on my childhood hot dog experience, I tried adding some slices of merguez, which worked quite well. These experiments brought me closer to what I was looking for, but they were still lacking. I was happy to discover that Gourmet has hit upon secret elixir that cuts the richness, and ties everything together, Dijon mustard. The Book’s version isn’t perfect, but I’m immensely grateful to it for bringing me closer to the ultimate macaroni and cheese recipe.

In this version, you make a three minute roux with butter, flour, and red pepper flakes, then whisk in milk and bring the sauce to a boil. After letting it boil for a few minutes, cream, extra-sharp Cheddar, and Dijon are added. The sauce is then added to cooked macaroni, and some of the water from the pot in a baking dish, then topped with mixture of butter, panko bread crumbs, and more cheese. The casserole goes into the oven for around half an hour, and then served.

The mustard and red pepper flakes make all the difference, and prevent this from being just too rich to be enjoyable. Getting the cheese right is important too. The recipe calls for extra-sharp Cheddar, which seems simple, but even an average grocery store will have about ten different versions, ranging from the plastic packaged stuff sold along with the milk, to fancy-pants imported stuff at the cheese counter. You can spend a fortune on truly wonderful Cheddar, but it’s probably a waste of money to go melting that into mac and cheese. The low end rubbery stuff will be OK, but not as good as it could be. The cheese really carries this dish so spending a bit more on a nice piece of aged local Cheddar is a worthwhile investment.

The recipe calls for panko, or other dried bread crumbs. I couldn’t get my hands on any panko, so I went with bread crumbs from the bakery down the street. Panko are known for their lightness and texture, while my bread crumbs were quite finely ground and dense. The 2 cups of panko the recipe called for might have been a nice topping, but 2 cups of my bread crumbs probably weighed twice as much as panko did. The macaroni was just too heavy on the topping, and the very dry bread crumbs sucked up a huge amount of moisture, so that within about 20 minutes of taking the dish out of the oven, the macaroni had set up, and lost the saucy-runny aspect you’re looking for in macaroni and cheese. You can see from the photo that it was next to impossible to find any of the macaroni under all the topping.

I think this recipe did a very nice job with the macaroni and sauce aspects, but fell short with the topping. I can’t comment on how it would have been with panko, but while they gave regular bread crumbs as an acceptable alternative, it obviously wasn’t. Beyond the topping, it was probably the best macaroni and cheese I’ve ever had. I’m sure that just a little tweaking could result in a truly great macaroni and cheese dinner, for the adults as well as the kids.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

137. Ratatouille p.586


The recipe

Everyone, or at least everyone who cares about food, has a stockpile of formative food memories, often centred on parents and grandparents doing things the way they’d always been done, or traveling experiences where the zeitgeist of your food universe is overturned by a brand new culture. The list of culinary luminaries who trace their food awakenings back to a summer trip to France is longer than I’d care to count. So it should come as no surprise that my thirteen year old self came home from a month long stay with a family near Lyons with a different perspective on food, and in particular ratatouille.

I don’t think I took nearly as much advantage of my time there as I should have, I mostly sulked, pittied myself, and felt homesick. I was an awful house guest, and I was convinced I was being punished. But, my hosts graciously put up with this insufferable Canadian brat, and exposed me to some wonderful things that I wasn’t ready to appreciate. Fifteen years later I can still taste most of the meals we ate, and the idea of staying in a four hundred year old farm house, surrounded by rolling pastures, creaky old barns, and tiny streams sounds wonderful. I wish I could go back and gather snails off the rocks in the field after a rain for escargot in garlic butter, and the weekly farmers market wouldn’t seem like the painful drudgery it did at the time. I owe that family a huge debt of gratitude, and an apology.

I did appreciate most of the food experiences at the time, the rich creamy yogurt was unlike anything I’d ever eaten, the impeccably cured sausages were a revelation, and of course the cheese. I also started to come around on very rare steak. The biggest change was the idea that vegetables could good enough to crave, and not just an afterthought to be gotten out of if at all possible. Ratatouille was the catalyst for that change. A nice older couple who had helped to organize my trip invited us over for lunch in the back garden, where we ate ratatouille, baguette, and nibbled on olives. At first I was puzzled by the lack of a meaty main course, but soon I couldn’t have cared less. The ratatouille was unbelievably good, and I just couldn’t understand why. My mother had made it before, and I was way to smart to fall for her hiding veggies in a stew trickery, so I turned my nose up at it. But this ratatouille was a completely different being, it was insanely flavourful, and multi layered with each element distinct, but contributing to the whole. There were tomatoes, garlic, peppers, onions, zucchini, eggplant, that were more fresh and explosively flavourful than I could ever have conceived of them being. That meal filled me with a sense of profound contentment, connectedness, and peace. Thinking back that euphoria probably had a lot more to do with the Champagne and Beaujolais they let me drink, but one way or another my perspective on ratatouille had been changed. I asked the old man what the secret was, and he told me about herbs de provence, so I brought a big bag home to try to get my mother to recreate it. Of course, my mother had herbs de provence, the secret was really in the incredible produce that went into the stew, and a lifetime spent honing the technique ’till his ratatouille was as good as it could be.

The Book’s ratatouille doesn’t live up to the old man’s, but it at least recalls it. The Book uses a very odd method, the recipe starts by making the tomato sauce with peeled (I didn’t bother) seeded and chopped tomatoes, sliced garlic, parsley, and basil leaves. While the sauce simmers, onions, bell peppers, zucchini, and eggplant are individually browned, then added to the tomato sauce and allowed to simmer for an hour. This batch browning of the veggies does a nice job building flavour, but it’s a huge pain, and it takes a whole whack of oil. I liked the added complexity, but there really was much more oil than necessary. I think you could get a similar effect by tossing the veggies with a more reasonable amount of oil and spreading them on cookie sheets and running them under the broiler for a few minutes. I was also surprised by the lack of herbs de provence, usually that herb blend is de rigueur for ratatouille. The basil only strategy turned out to be quite delicious, but I did miss the other flavours. My favorite ratatouilles have quite distinct chunks of vegetables, which retain some of their original texture, while softening into a cohesive blend with the others. Here, everything got a bit too soft, and I wonder if it wouldn’t have worked better to simmer it for less time, but let it sit in the fridge for a day or two before serving it.

I made this ratatouille twice within a few weeks. I was very well pleased with my first attempt, and decided to bring a second batch to a large family affair. The second attempt just didn’t live up to the first one, and I can’t explain why. The first batch went over pretty well with my dining companion, and some friends I served it to, but the second was largely ignored at dinner. That inconsistency is kind of worrying to me, I have no clue what factors I varied in my second attempt, but it just didn’t have that special something. My first try was very good, and could have been excellent with a few tweaks, however the inexplicably mediocre second attempt will keep me from giving this a great rating.

Categories
Soups The Book

136. Mushroom Barley Soup p.113


The recipe

This soup suffers from a serious branding issue. If it had been billed as barely soupy barley stew, with extra barley, some carrots, and hardly any mushrooms at all, I would have known what I was getting into. The blurb for the recipe talks about all the contrasting mushroom flavours and blah blah blah, but I really had to do some food styling to get any mushrooms in the photo at all. I picked this recipe because I wanted a mushroom soup, and I was looking forward to a little added body from the barley, and a nice background of aromatics. I ended up with a perfectly OK barley stew that I wasn’t at all in the mood for.

The recipe starts by browning garlic and onion in a large pot, then adding sliced white mushrooms, soaked and sliced shiitake’s, soy sauce, cooking out the liquid, then adding sherry and evaporating that too. The liquid is then added in the form of chicken stock, water, and the mushroom soaking liquid. The barley, carrots, and dried thyme and rosemary are added and the soup simmers for an hour. When it’s ready it’s seasoned with salt and pepper, and some parsley is stirred in just before serving.

The texture was very thick and hearty, with most of the flavour coming from the chicken stock and aromatics. It actually tasted a whole lot like my mom’s beef and barley soup, but without the deep beef stock and hearty chunks of meat that made that a satisfying winter lunch. The chicken stock left it tasting thin and whimpy, and seriously overpowered by the mushy barley texture. I should reiterate that for a mushroom barley soup, mushrooms were not a flavour consideration.

Unfortunately this soup was in a rotten in between spot. With less barley and four times more mushrooms it could have been the nice mushroom soup it advertised itself as, or using a more concentrated stock, and adding rich chunks of meat, could have resulted in a thick barely stew worth eating. As it was, it was perfectly edible, but nothing to look forward to.