Ingredients
. Roux (butter, onion, flour)
. Chicken Stock (for veloute sauce base-spinach)
. Milk (for bechamel sauce base-cauliflower)*
. Spinach or Cauliflower
. Heavy Cream
*The recipe called for whole milk, but in the interest of certain individuals of higher cholesterol levels, we opted for skim-plus milk, which, from the taste, seemed an adequate substitution.
Special Tools
. Fine-Mesh Sieve
. Flexible Spatula
. Immersion Blender
Notes from the Kitchen
. Mise en place (preparing ingredients first) is effective.
. Try to remember to bring your own knife (Laura).
. When effectively skimmed during the cooking stage, the chicken stock will not have that satisfying layer of fat to peel off; instead you must gently skim the thin floating fat off the top.
. The translucent or glassy stage of the "sweated" onion is much easier to determine (to the untrained eye, ahem, Laura) in a stainless steel pot.
. Cauliflower florets need to be chopped very finely to cook thoroughly; stem sections should cook for longer than the extra 1 minute suggested.
. As with all our soups, without a pot taller than wide, evaporation eventually wins out during the cooking process, requiring, in the case of the cauliflower soup, additional milk in order for the vegetable to cook until soft.
. The cauliflower stems never actually got mushy before we gave in and just pureed it. It worked out just fine. No pun intended.
. Rinse the pot in which the spinach is blanched—ours had grit, even after 2 thorough washes of the raw leaves.
. Cut all stems off of the spinach; the fibrous mass just ends up plugging up the sieving process.
. Passing the final soup through the fine sieve makes it incredibly smooth, and thus well worth the effort.
. Heating the serving bowls is an excellent idea, but on a cold February evening, the soup still got cold quickly. Solutions?
Notes of Less Pertinence but Equal Importance
. What exactly is the consistency of cream?
. Is it any surprise that the artist created the cream design
in the spinach?
. Do the gentlemen actually recall this precious soup at all?
Eating the Results
Laura says: The most interesting thing was comparing the two bases for the soup—milk versus stock. The richness of the homemade stock really punched through the spinach, balancing perfectly a sometimes-overwhelming vegetable. And the cauliflower had such silkiness that the creaminess was eased of any heaviness. Long gone are my assumptions that a vegetable puree soup is a simple matter of using the hand-blender.
Claudine says: Though the book says any of the vegetable soups can be made either as a "veloute-based" (stock thickened with roux) or "bechamel-based" (with milk instead), my instinct tells me that the milk vs. stock pairings we chose (stock with the spinach to balance the strong flavor and milk with the cauliflower to underline the creaminess) really worked out well. If we had switched the pairings I have a feeling the spinach flavor might have been overwhelming. But maybe the cauliflower would gain from the flavor of the stock, in which case, are all soups better as veloutes?
Useful Links
Chicken Stock
Photo from www.MarthaStewart.com
