(French) Onion Soup: the easier way

So I had a bundle full of gentlemen coming over to hang out, play games and be of good cheer. I was asked if I could make them lunch. Thankfully, I was also after a new Heston Blumenthal dish to try - one that scaled well, and didn't take too much trouble for an easy weekend. French Onion soup it is.

Onion Soup

Heston Blumenthal at Home

This recipe makes good use of one of Heston's often mentioned star anise in onion. Which makes sense, because onion soup is largely onion and stock. In a good way. A delicious, caramelised brown bowl of tastiness.

Caramelise onion

To start, take some oil...

 a lot of onion...

 and some star anise.

 Start cooking and stirring...

 Keep going until it is lightly caramelised

Bake

Add some butter and cold water.

Then put it in the oven for seven hours at 90 degrees. It will then look a bit like this. Don't worry, it's not as crusty and unpleasant as it looks. 

 

Remove the star anise

This may take some hunting.

Then de-glaze with some white wine, then cook to reduce the wine away.

 

Add the liquids

Add the beef stock and simmer.

For 20 minutes.

Then add some Madeira, and let it simmer for another 20 minutes.

Add some more Madeira (I skipped this, feeling it was boozy enough) and salt and pepper.

Time to make the toast!

Pan fry some sourdough in butter.

Smear them with Dijon mustard, cover them in Gruyere cheese and grill.

Serve soup, with cheesy toast floating/wallowing in the thick soup, scattered with artistic chives. Regular chives would also be acceptable.

Lessons learned

• Recipe, as is often the case for Heston, makes way more than you need. For example, you only need one slice of bread per person. I had all strapping young gents and even they found it plenty.

That's it really. It went pretty well to plan.

Verdict

Another good, easy recipe that need elapsed time but not a huge amount of active time. Of course, caramelising the onions took longer than the 15 minutes Heston claims, but I've found recipes always underestimate that time. A note to those not familiar with this dish - it is more filling than you'd expect.

Guest verdict

The gentlemen gathered at lunch all enjoyed the soup very much.
My favourite comment was from a guest who'd never had a from-scratch onion soup before. "So this is what French onion soup actually tastes like! I feel like I've been lied to my whole life."

Winter Feast : Heston’s (really good) pumpkin soup

A winter’s night feast!

New dinner party time – with three whole Heston recipes! And yes, in hindsight I probably did take on too much, but I knew it was a dinner for very forgiving friends – you know the kind – they happily try out stuff you made and accept the failures and cheer the triumphs as part of the journey.

This dinner, coming in the middle of winter was an excellent time to try out dishes best suited to a cold night. So we had:

• Pumpkin soup
• Fish pie with Sand and Sea topping
• Lardy cake

 

Soup: Pumpkin Soup

(from Heston Blumenthal at Home)

I love a relatively low effort dish. I say relatively, because this one can scale in complexity, depending on how many of the “optional” components you add. But even if you do all the extras, the effort is still very manageable. And tasty. Did I mention tasty?

So this has the following steps:

1. Prep your pumpkin.
2. Roast half the pumpkin, pan cook the other half with onion
3. Make rosemary flavoured milk
4. Add the items from 1-3 plus water and cook in a pan.
5. Puree it.
6. Make your extras.
7. Prep your plates, and serve.

 So yes, there are seven steps, but really there’s nothing super complicated about this.

I did everything up to the making of the extras (and some of them) the day before because I was making fish pie on the day of the party, and as you’ll see in my next post, that was a seriously crazy amount of work.

Prep your pumpkin

Take your lovely pumpkin. (I only needed half a pumpkin to get the 850g of flesh required).

 

Use a mandolin to slice half thinly, and chop the half into fat cubes for roasting. I also used the mandolin to quickly slice up those three onions, since it was out anyway.

Cook your pumpkin

The cubes of pumpkin go in the oven while you melt a staggering amount of butter. Well, it is Heston after all. 

 

Add in your thin sheets of pumpkin and onion and get them going. Or get bored waiting for the butter to completely melt, and put them all in anyway. 

Cook until soft and golden and smell really great.

Check out the delicious roasted pumpkin!

Make rosemary milk

Those people familiar with the process of making infused milk for ice-cream purposes will know this bit. Heat up your milk until almost simmering, take it off the heat, bung in your rosemary and then leave to infuse. You may be surprised how much flavour the milk can take on doing this.

Once it’s done infusing, strain out the rosemary, leaving savoury-smelling milk. Interesting. (I’m far too used to it smelling like vanilla my brain was getting mixed feelings about that as a result).

Into the pot!

In goes all the pumpkin, onion and rosemary-scented milk. Simmer away, you.

 

Puree it

I really need to get onto a new stab blender at some point. But  it works, so never mind! Make sure it’s really smooth. You are supposed to pass through a fine sieve. I may have done this, or not. I can’t recall.

You do then get to make Jackson Pollock-inspired designs as you add in cayenne, salt, sesame oil and balsamic. Isn’t it pretty? Then puree it away. (Never mind, art can be transient, and more beautiful for it). This is done to taste. I know some found the suggested quantity of sesame oil too overpowering. I used probably half the listed sesame oil and three quarters of the balsamic. And got my super-tasting husband to check the balance.

Make your extras

In this case, four extras. Red pepper (capsicum) diamonds, roasted red pepper oil, hazelnut dust and brown butter.

Roasted capsicum (peppers)

Heston has another variant on another trick I’ve seen for roasting (or rather peeling) roasted capsicum.

Cut up your capsicum, and grill until skins are nicely blackened.

Put them (hot) into a bowl and cover with cling film. (I’d seen this done as putting them into a plastic freezer bag, but I like the bowl version better). Leave them to cool.  Once cool you can just pull off the skins pretty easily, leaving the deliciously sweet flesh. Yum.

Cut some into diamond shapes.

Red pepper (capsicum) oil

Pretty straightforward – take some roasted capsicum and lots of olive oil.

Blend it.

Strain it either with a reasonable sieve or, do what I did and very carefully strain it in stages through a tea strainer into a mug.

Ok, it worked, but was pretty fiddly and I had to be super careful not to spill any non-sieved oil into the mug.  Just a note, you need hardly any of this to serve, so make the smallest quantity that seems reasonable to you. Seriously, you need a few drops per person.

Hazelnut dirt  (Hazelnut and rosemary mixture)

Hazelnut and rosemary mixture is what Heston seems to call it, but it looks just like dirt. Or maybe fine sand. Albeit tasty dirt. Really, its just toasted hazelnuts, fresh rosemary and dry breadcrumbs whizzed into powder. I thought it would be oily somehow, but nope. (Excuse the bunnikins bowl, I started running out of grown up bowls to hold all the components for assembly there. I’ll trust you’ll forgive the lack of gravity this brings).

Brown butter

So this isn’t difficult, but does have an excellent tip from Heston for improving your brown butter.

Cook your butter until a nice nut-brown colour in a little frypan or saucepan.

Then, filter it through a coffee filter.

This worked really well! Other than being a tad messy, it produces a beautiful clear brown butter without any clumps or browned solid bits – just beautifully clear brown butter.

Prep your plates

Something that takes this dish into the above the ordinary (or “pumpkin-flavoured water” as one guest called most pumpkin soup) is the extras.

Warm up your brown butter, and using a pastry brush, surround the tops of your bowls with a thick-ish rim of butter.

Now, much like flouring a cake pan, sprinkle on your hazelnut dirt. I’ve heard from a friend she had trouble making hers stick but mine seemed to stick without a problem.

Add in some pumpkin seeds (often labelled as pepita) and some of the roasted capsicum diamonds.

Serve

Aerate the soup with your stab blender and ignore the bemusement from your guests when they ask what you are doing. Ladle in the soup carefully to the bowls and dot on some of the red capsicum oil.
(This is a seriously bad photo, sorry. It was a lovely orange colour, with dots of deep red. Photo editing couldn't fix it either.!) 

Thoughts

A successful dish. The flavour was really very good, and the combination of roasted and sautéed pumpkin plus the sesame oil and balsamic gave it a real depth of flavours going on.  The pumpkin seeds and roasted capsicum pieces also added to the dish far more than I thought they would.

You could probably skip the roasted capsicum oil, but since you want the roasted capsicum pieces, its really not much more effort. I’d certainly make this again, especially if pumpkin was in season.

Guest verdict

This was a very popular dish, especially considering it is, superficially at least, fairly standard fare. Many guests opted for second helpings, and many nice things were said. Including one convert from a non-pumpkin soup loving (the “pumpkin soup just tastes like pumpkin-flavoured water” gentleman) to being second-helping seeking happy guest. (His other half was most impressed). If that’s not endorsement, I’m not sure what it would take!

Next post: Fish pie. The most complicated Heston dish I’ve yet undertaken.


As an aside: Have you been watching Heston on Masterchef? I'm envious. How awesome would that be to cook with him?! Plus, I want to play with all their kitchen toys. Smoking gun? Yes please! Liquid nitrogen? I used to use that in a previous job, I'm totally there.

Entree: Red cabbage gazpacho with mustard icecream

I'll admit that for this dish, I was definitely drawn in by the wow factor - bright purple soup, tiny pale green cubes and pale yellow ball of ice cream. Also, since it was a December lunch, a better reason for this soup I could not imagine.

It was fairly straightforward, with a few steps, but nothing complicated.

To recap, this is the entree dish from my mother's special birthday lunch.
There were six courses...

1. Beetroot lollies (*)
2. Red cabbage gazpacho with mustard ice cream (*)
3. Goat cheese tarts
4. Salmon with Bois Boudran Sauce (*), green salad
5. Tiramisu (*)
6. Chocolate biscuits (*), tea and coffee

Red cabbage gazpacho with mustard ice cream

Process

1. Make mustard ice cream
2. Make mayonaise
3. Prepare soup
4. Assemble & serve

Step one: Make mustard ice cream

Yes, this would definitely be my first time making and eating a savoury ice cream. 

Assemble your ingredients. I was quite surprised that it has sugar in it, and no eggs. It also has powdered milk - this was tough to find. Heston recommends semi-skinned powdered milk, but I could only get full cream, so that's what I used. It supposed to allow you to add extra protein while managing the fat levels (which may not have been ideal since I was using full cream, but I work with what I have!

Okay, normal ice cream process, milk & cream components get heated. That lumpy stuff is the powdered milk pre whisking and heating.

 

 Then you chill it.

 Then in goes the huge quantity of mustard.

Based on the instructions, clearly Heston is assuming you have a refrigerated unit. Sadly, I don't. (Though it is on my wish list.)

So the ice cream goes into the ice cream maker for churning. what you might notice at this point is... it makes at least twice as much ice cream as you could possibly want. Firstly, I don't think mustard ice cream is something you sit down and eat bowls of - unlike vanilla or whatever. And you only need one scoop per person for the dish so I'd say the quantity given would feed more than 20 people. It make 2 litres or so. Double what I can fit in my ice cream maker, meaning I had to do it in batches. Grrr.

So it goes in to freeze. Except... it didn't freeze properly. It was still really sloppy and not frozen enough.

So, I resorted to my last ditch attempt... put the whole unit in the freezer.

That worked better!

Then, you take it out and blitz it with a stab blender and then re-freeze. This is supposed to break up the bigger ice crystals into smaller ones, but frankly I don't think this did anything.

Except make it slushy again.

Okay back to the freezer for about an hour, and now it's looking like normal ice cream, pre final freezing stage.

Then it comes out looking quite nice. I tried some. This blew my mind a bit - I really couldn't decide if I liked it or not. I could tell on first taste it didn't take bad, but couldn't get my head around it.  I eventually decided it was nice - quite like eating frozen home made coleslaw dressing. But definitely unusual.

Step two: Make mayonnaise

So, at it's heart, the gazpacho is mostly red cabbage juice thickened with mayonnaise. Luckily, it doesn't taste the way that reads. I've not made a lot of mayonnaisese, having had a bad experience previously. This one worked fine, and tasted good, but not amazing.

Mustard and egg yolk are whisked...

 Then drip in a little grape seed oil at a time and whisk it in. (Incidentally, I now suspect that my previous bad experience may have come from using a too strongly tasting olive oil, which just swamped all the flavour).

Okay, nice and thick looking.

 Whisk in the red wine and the red wine vinegar.

Well done, you've made pink mayonnaise! It's pretty tasty, but not too overpowering for the red wine. The photo doesn't show it well, but it was a kind of pale baby pink colour.

Step three: Prepare the soup

This step was so easy I kept feeling like I was missing something.
Take big amazing purple red cabbage.

Juice it.

Be surprised just how much juice there is in a cabbage. This was another case of Heston's quantities being out of whack - twice as much cabbage as needed to get the quantity of juice required. Maybe we just have superior cabbages here in Aus.. :)

Weight out the appropriate quantity of juice. As you can see the juice is this amazing royal purple colour. Also, having tasted some I was surprise the flavour was much lighter and not as strongly cabbage-y as I thought it would be.

Put in a piece of white bread. This is supposed to thicken the juice using the proteins in the bread.

My bread and cabbage juice, ready for straining. I have to say i could tell absolutely no difference in the thickness of the soup from the bread. So much so, I think you could skip that step entirely.

Strain your soup through muslin, squishing out all the liquid from the bread. (Two hand job and a tad messy, thus no photo.)

Whisk in your mayonnaise to taste, thereby making the most garish naturally coloured thing you may ever make. Possible reason enough in itself to make it!

This is the big jug ready for serving.

Step four: Assemble

I finely diced the cucumber, being very anal detail oriented about getting perfect equal sized tiny cubes.

Place one scoop of mustard ice cream on top of each pile of cubes. Serve these to guests, and bring in the giant jug of purple to the table. (It's epic!) Pour out some soup for each guest.

Done!

 

Things I learned.

• Watch those ice cream volumes for future recipes, as they likely will need to be halved to fit in my 1L ice cream maker. I really wonder about who recipe tested this book sometimes. Flavours etc are all fine, but the quantities are all over the place, typically with way more than you need.
• Cabbage juice is much nicer than I would have thought. 
• The at the table theatre of the serving is definitely part of the fun.

Verdict:

This was nice, but not amazing. Kind of a refreshing salady-thing in flavour. It was easy to make and was very dramatic in a food theatre kind of way. I wish the flavour was equal to the presentation. (Again, flavour was nice, but I wasn't floored, the way I have been with some dishes).

Guest opinions

Guests were hard to gauge (they are my mother's friends, and all had their "being polite" hats on). Generally though, most enjoyed it. All I think were fascinated by it. I know at least one person really loved it (as she's mentioned so several times to mum since).

I did take another batch of soup (partly to use up the leftover mass of ice cream) to a BBQ. There, most who tried it weren't fans. I'm not sure whether that was just the wrong forum, the wrong crowd (they mostly just thought it was odd) or just a general dislike. It certainly lost something in translation to a casual dish!

Next time-  the star of the show : Salmon with Bois Boudran Sauce