Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Garlic Soup at Home

For dinner, I had homemade garlic soup, with a roasted acorn squash half.



I had leftover garlic, olive oil, and anchovy pasta for lunch, so I figured my breath was already shot for the day (Jon confirmed this. Rapidly.) Then, while we were grocery shopping, I remembered reading this and this awhile back, and decided to give the concept a try. Did I actually bother to call up the recipe on my new iPhone while at the grocery store? No. I laugh in the face of recipes.

So, of course I come home and realize I don't have the baguette I need. Nor sherry, sadly. I actually like fino sherry and usually do have it on hand.

Forget recipes, I decided to read a few different ones for context and then improvise. I ended up cooking perhaps ten cloves in olive oil, then adding chicken broth (half from a leftover box, half homemade!), and simmering it for awhile.




I decided it needed body, so, with much trepidation, I tried a technique I've never tried before- adding an egg to the hot soup. Embarrassing blogger confession, but eggs make me really nervous. My mayonnaise always sucks. Custards are even worse. And poaching? I can do it, but I usually don't want to eat the result.

The technique is to add the hot liquid to the egg in very small increments while stirring furiously. To my surprise, it actually worked, and I got a nicely emulsified soup without any egg chunks.

The result was very Japanese to me, and not at all garlicky. The flavors were incredibly subtle, with a silky, chickeny creaminess that makes it seem like dairy was involved, without any heaviness. I did not cook the garlic long enough to render it mushy, so the cloves remained whole in the soup. They had been thoroughly cooked, so added only a very mild, mellow flavor. I added some leftover arugula to the soup, and a bit of lemon juice and salt to balance it all.

6 comments:

Stephanie said...

I've been on a garlic soup kick lately too! Tuesday night actually, I made two versions to taste side-by-side. I really liked the garlic soup I had in Prague, so I tried to recreate that (basically garlic in a half beef stock- half chicken broth stock). The other version was for a recipe I found online (don't tell Chris Kimball) for "Austrian" garlic soup - more creamy, basically a garlic roux thinned with veg stock with lots and lots of parsley. Both were really good!

Gen said...

Nice. You really need to start a food blog- I only hear about all the cool stuff you cook when you talk about it here or Facebook.

In your experience, how garlicky is garlic soup? I was disappointed mine wasn't more pungent. Is it supposed to be very mild? I had a ukranian-style borsch in Riga that was delicious and garlicky, so when I think about garlic soup, I think about that.

Stephanie said...

I don't know - but I think I have an abnormal tolerance for garlic. Mine didn't taste overwhelmingly garlic-y to me, but I think it definitely had definitive flavor. How much did you use? I tend to use a whole head for a pot of soup...

Gen said...

Oh, I love garlic, too. I used about ten cloves for maybe two cups of soup? But in cooking the cloves long enough to soften them, the flavors became blunted. I wonder if the solution is to grate a little fresh garlic into the soup right before serving....

Stephanie said...

oooh - grating some raw garlic at the end would be good! Also, do you grate the garlic initially, or chop it? Maybe leaving it in bigger pieces when you saute would keep it from mellowing out too much? I think the soup I had in prague had recognizable bits of garlic in it...

Gen said...

Now I'm really curious to play with the variables. This weekend might just be garlic soup weekend...

I didn't chop the cloves at all for my soup, but I did let them soften for awhile (7 or 8 minutes?) before adding the chicken broth, and then simmered the soup for another fifteen or so. I suppose the flavors won't change any more or less than that- in the process of softening the garlic, the flavors are going to change, regardless of the size of the cloves...I think the solution must be grated raw garlic, right at the end, so it doesn't have time to cook at all.