Mushroom Soup

I was away for a couple of days and discovered a kilo of mushrooms in the fridge when I arrived home. Apparently they were on sale! This fact, combined with the sudden cold, wet and dark weather, called out SOUP. So I made a huge pot of mushroom soup. I'm halving the recipe here because it's not usual to buy a whole kilo of mushrooms unless you are cooking for a large number of people. Since you are making half of what I made it is also likely that you can make it in less than 1 hour.

Preparation time: 1 hour; makes 1.5 l  

Ingredients:

50 g	Butter
75 g	Onions, diced
1 tsp.	Garlic, finely diced
50 g	Flour
600 ml	Water
1	Vegetable cube
600 ml	Milk
500 g	Mushrooms
	Salt & Pepper, to taste
2 tbsp.	Lemon juice
4 tbsp.	Cream

Method:

The thing that took me forever was washing the mushrooms. I learned recently that you are not supposed to wash mushrooms because they absorb the water that you wash them in and don't taste as good. I'm still going to wash my mushrooms because they are always dirty, but apparently you could buy a special mushroom brush to brush away the dirt. Just another gadget to have in an already overstuffed kitchen! I think not.

Well once they are washed I trim off the ends of my now "soggy" mushrooms and then slice them roughly. If you want to have a chunky soup and don't want to run it through a liquidizer then you will have to dice them, or slice them, finely. I personally don't like chunky soups.

Then dice the onions and the garlic.

Heat the butter in a large, heavy bottomed saucepan on medium heat. If you burn the butter tip it out and  start again, else the soup will not taste good. Once the butter has melted add the onions and the garlic and stir (to prevent burning) for around 3 minutes, or until the onions are cooked. The next step is to add the flour to the mixture and continue to stir so that the flour does not burn or stick to the bottom of the pan. Cook it for about 1 minute. Next you have to slowly add the water. Add about 1/2 cup of water, stirring it in until you have a lumpless paste. If your Sri Lankan then the instructions would be... it should look like pappa (which is a glue made out of flour and water that we are all too familiar with)! Then continue adding water 1/2 cup at a time until all the water is used up. By this time your soup should be quite liquid. Now add the milk. If the soup is already liquid enough then just add the whole thing in there and stir it around. Also put in the vegetable cubes. 

If you are going to liquidize your soup then you don't need to be too worried if there are lumps of flour in the soup. 

Bring the whole thing to a boil (you can increase the heat to get it to boil quicker) and add the mushrooms and salt and pepper to taste. 

Be careful, the vegetable cube is quite salty so make sure you taste it before adding more salt. Allow your soup to simmer over low heat for another 10 minutes or so. Then it is almost done. All you have to do is liquidize it. I am a fan of the stick mixer with a metal stick. This can be inserted directly into the boiling soup and the soup can be pulverized. However, you must be very, very careful and know how your gadget works. Else you will end up with hot soup splashed all over you and some pretty nasty burns. If you are not sure allow your soup to cool first (this cooling is not accounted for in the preparation time. One way to decrease the time would be to add the mushrooms to the mixture once the water has been added, then remove the pan from the heat and then add cold milk to the mixture. This should bring it to a decent temperature to experiment with.) If you use a liquidizer then you have to cool the liquid all the way down before liquidizing. Again, the preparation time does not take this into account. Once you have the required smoothness, bring the soup back to the boil. 

Remove it from the heat and add the lemon juice and cream. You can also add the cream later into the individual bowls to make it look fancy. No time for that over here. Soup has to be served piping hot. That means that it cannot be served in the kitchen and then left to sit on the dinning table!

NOTE: This soup freezes pretty well. So if you happen to return to a fridge full of mushrooms you know what to do.

Chef friendly version