Garlic Soup

When I try a recipe from the Times, I'm always careful to look at the comments first to see what people suggest or say. Often, this can avert all-out disaster or improve the outcome. In this case, there was an element of this recipe which I wasn't happy about and one of the comments made me even more concerned for how it would affect the outcome so I made an alteration which was likely for the worse.

In this recipe for garlic soup, the thickening agent is crust-less bread. I'm rather familiar with this style of thickening soups or stews because my sister used to be in the SCA and a lot of medieval recipes call for bread crumbs as their way of thickening. The problem I had with this was two-fold. One of the commenters said that her soup was a "gluey mess" and I also felt it was adding calories without either an interesting taste or nutrition. When another commenter mentioned using white beans instead, I felt that would be a better bet. It turns out that I was wrong. While my soup wasn't bad at all, it did suffer from some issues that could definitely have been avoided and may have been had I been faithful to the original recipe.

The main problem with my soup was that the sweet smoked paprika flavor was too strong and it was far too thin. Also, it was too oily, especially when it cooled as my soup totally separated such that cold oil congealed on the top and the pureed white beans settled onto the bottom. I'm guessing the bread would have prevented this from occurring, but I also think that the recipe simply has far more oil (1/4 cup) in it than is really necessary.

On the bright side, this soup tasted like authentic Spanish chorizo smells. If you want to drink some of that type of sausage, this is your soup. The flavors are generally good, and I think it helped in my case that I was using some really great homemade chicken stock that I had leftover from making pollo en pipian verde, but I need to tweak it and make changes to turn it into something that meets my tastes.

Though I regard this generally as a failure, I'm very happy that I tried it as I think it will form the backbone of a different soup with a flavor profile I never would have come up with had I not tried this. In the future, I hope to make a soup with a lot more diversity, less oil, and similar flavors. My general plan is to do something which includes these ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil (1/2 the original)
6 cloves of garlic (same as original)
1 small onion (diced and sauteed after the garlic is removed - not in original at all)
2 teaspoons smoked paprika (a little under 1/2 the original)
4 cups chicken stock (same as original)
2 cups cooked white beans (not in original)

I haven't decided yet if I'll toss in other vegetables, but I think that it needs more thickening agents or taste modifiers. It's possible that I'll throw in a potato as well. When I try this again, I'll post an update of the modified recipe.

Puree of Chickpea Soup

The internet is full of lies. I know this comes as no surprise, but there is no greater concentration of lies than in recipes. Bloggers offer gorgeous galleries of food porn and gush about the deliciousness of their recipes when the results are often quite terrible. They lie to your eyes as well as your ears.

This is something I have known for a long time, but I still am occasionally suckered in by a certain picture. Such was the case with this recipe for puree of chickpea soup. While looking over the ingredients, I couldn't help but think, "this looks like nothing more than hummus in soup form." I don't mean that anything with chickpeas is going to be like hummus. This actually duplicates a lot of the ingredients in hummus (garlic, olive oil, cumin, coriander, lemon juice, salt) and doesn't add much that hummus excludes. Red onions are pretty much the only deviation. Of course, there is also the method of preparation, but I was still drawn in by the gorgeous picture of a snowy white puree with golden droplets of olive oil and bits of fresh mint.

I don't know where the author got her chickpeas or how she got them to be so incredibly pale, but I'm guessing more than a little Photoshop trickery played a part. After all, you've got red onion, brown cumin, and coriander, and off-white chickpeas. How does any of that add up to a creamy pile of whiteness? At any rate, my soup looked like what it largely was, a bowl of slightly runny hummus:

I followed the recipe faithfully for this including going out of my way to purchase a red onion for the dish.  I even went so far as to pass the soup through a fine mesh sieve to get a super smooth texture and it is very velvety if you do that. I'd say it's worth it for the finer texture, but I'm sure it's very good chunky as well. The only thing I did not do is garnish it with olive oil and mint. I don't mind adding in the oil, but this is a delicately flavored soup and I found that stirring in the olive oil at the end of making the soup had already made it taste too strongly of olive oil. I didn't want this to be overwhelmed by more olive oil flavor and I frankly don't care for mint so I had it without the accouterments. I will note that you have to salt this very heavily to bring out the flavors.

In terms of how this tasted, it was very good if you like hummus, and I do. My only disappointment with this was that it wasn't unique enough nor did it provide the visual appeal of the pictured recipe. I may make this again, but, if I do, I'll likely make it in a pressure cooker as the dry chickpeas took forever to soften and even then they weren't super soft. 

Tuscan Bean Soup

I read a site devoted to foodies called "Chowhound" because it has one of the more active forums and communities among various food-related web sites. Unfortunately, as is the wont of foodies everywhere, they can be rather snobbish when it comes to food. I once bore witness to some of the more common variety of this in a discussion about garlic. One person turned his nose up at the very notion of using powdered garlic in recipes. Another, quite appropriately, said that he couldn't imagine using raw garlic in his egg or tuna salad.

The irony of a lot of food snobbery is that the attitudes were the opposite in the distant culinary past. The reason we have dried spices rather than use fresh ones was that they wouldn't travel well. People in England who were fortunate enough to have access to dried, ground cinnamon saw it as something worth more than an equivalent weight in silver. They had something rare and precious that would last. 

The only reason we can be snobs about fresh vs. dried spices is that we have the luxury of allowing spices to go to waste. When I buy a bunch of fresh cilantro for 99 cents at the market, I know I'm never going to use all of it before it goes bad, and I make some pretty cilantro-heavy recipes that use more than most. I have to freeze the remainder or toss it when the remains go off.

When I found this recipe for Tuscan bean soup, I had to choose between doing some specialty shopping for fresh parsley, pancetta, and dry beans, or use what I had on hand - dried parsley, regular thick-cut bacon, and canned beans. I opted for the latter, but I did my best to retain as much of the original recipe as possible. 

Usually, I don't list the recipes ingredients here because I don't want to rob the Times of their page views. In this case, I changed enough that I'm going to list out what I used, but I didn't change quantities or essential ingredients; I changed quantities (I cut the recipe in half) and form:

Ingredients:

• 2 slices thick-cut bacon
• 1 large onion, diced
• 2 tablespoons dried parsley
• 1 small bay leaf
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
• 1 (15.8 oz.) can Great Northern White beans
• 3 Roma tomatoes, pureed
• salt and pepper, to taste

Since I was using canned beans, I had to cook the onions separately. My method was as follows:

Heat a large Dutch oven over medium heat. Cook bacon slices until crisp and brown. Remove from the pan, leaving bacon fat and drippings behind (this was my substitute for the olive oil in the Times recipe). 

Reduce heat to medium-low. Add the diced onions and cook for about five minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the garlic and saute until the strong smell diminishes (about five more minutes). Stir in the parsley and bay leaf; add black pepper and salt to taste. Cook until the onions are no longer releasing moisture through vapor and are thoroughly (about five more minutes). The mix should be very fragrant now.

Add the can of beans, liquid included, and then fill the can with water, add to soup pot, and stir everything together. Bring to a simmer, cover with a lid, and cook for about 10 minutes. Add the pureed tomatoes and simmer for another 15 minutes. 

Remove half of the soup and puree in a blender. Add the puree back into the soup and stir. Taste and add more salt if desired. Crumble the reserved bacon and either stir back into the soup (adds flavor) or serve as a garnish on top (retains texture). 

I actually used more garlic than I'm listing here, but I realized it was too much and have adjusted the recipe here. It isn't overbearing, but I had to really cook it down to diminish the amount of strong garlic flavor. I think that can be avoided by using less garlic.

I have another recipe for Tuscan white bean soup and this one caught my eye because it is so different. Mine uses thyme and lemon juice. This uses parsley and tomato. When I smelled the finished soup, the aroma reminded me of minestrone. The texture was a creamy,  yet still chunky, delight. There is no picture of this soup on the Times recipe page, but this is what mine looked like:

The flavor is more "beany" than some if you don't drain the beans. I prefer it undrained, but I guess drained beans would provide a less robust white bean experience. I liked that the flavors were somewhat delicate while still being very present. Usually, I use some sort of meat stock flavoring (like bouillon) in my soups to give it a strong, savory backbone. This was relying much more heavily on the vegetables and spices so the sense was less intense, but in no way flavorless or boring. The tomatoes also shone through a bit which lent a nice warmth to the soup.

This is an excellent soup to have as a complete meal and I'm sure I'll make it again some time.