so, i've been at the new place for almost two months, and it's just rad being the soup guy. soup is something i've noodled around with (ha!) for a while now, and have to say, i'm getting pretty good at it. on thursday i made a nice, light chicken bisque, nothing special, but it was good. and had a great profit margin. on friday i came in with the intention of doing either a loaded baked potato soup or bacon, beer and cheese. but, the kitchen murphy's law kicked in and none of my deliveries showed up on time. so i had no dairy. can't make potato soup without dairy. also really low on cheese and needed it for sammiches. so no beer cheese. i could have done some sort of beef soup, but all we have is sirloin and hamburger and sirloin is too expensive for soup and hamburger sucks in it. so i'm looking at just running the chicken bisque again and i absolutely hate running the same soup two lunches in a row. so i cooked up some rice in chicken stock and lemon juice and added a couple handfuls of greek oregano. finished it with lemon zest. boom. lemon chicken and rice. it was awesome. to the customers, it was a totally different soup, to me, it was making money off something we already made money off of. double bonus. and then yesterday, homeless chef (he's our recent culinary school grad, and he's huge, and hairy, and always looks like he just worked a double) noticed our red peppers were about to go bad, the skins were starting to wrinkle pretty bad, and we both went "roast em". so he fired up all the burners and charred the crap out of the peppers. then he made a simple base with onions and tomato stock. then he made a bleu cheese bechamel (which i just wanted to drink like a milkshake), and pureed everything together, and it was AMAZING. simply amazing. and we were just trying to use the peppers before we threw them away and they were a total loss. i love little kitchen victories like that.
also i love homeless chef. i respect the fact that he's a culinary graduate and he respects the fact that i've been kicking ass on the line since he was in grade school. plus we both like ska. he makes my saturdays awesome.
Thank you Mr. Minor
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8 comments:
Last week I asked 3 of my staff to define "soup." They all hesitated. Soup has been traced back to 6000 b.c.e. yet lifelong cooks still struggle with it. There seems to be a lot of cooks who either don't understand soup, don't eat soup, or try their best to avoid being responsible for soup. Then you have those cooks who do care and inevitably become known as the cook who is responsible for the soup. To all my fellow soup bitches out there, crock on!
What is used to thicken a bisque? I was seriously annoyed that i did not know the answer to this question.
Rice
Your forgot to form it in a question. What is rice? No Soup for you, come back in one year!
i have always been told you use a roux to thicken a bisque. never heard rice was the traditional thickener. my assumption was a bisque was thickened with a roux and didn't have dairy. a soup with dairy and roux is a chowder, right?
Chowder can also be made with a tomato base, Manhattan Clam Chowder.
manhattan clam chowder is just half tomato soup and half clam chowder. not really a tomato base. back in the day (late 1800s-early 1900s), a place called delmonico's in new york was the place to be, and apparently they had over 200 different soups. they made most of them by mixing two or more soups, and it was delmonico's that first introduced manhattan clam chowder. they took yesterday's clam chowder and today's tomato soup and mixed them and gave it a new york name.
From History of Manhattan Clam Chowder:
http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Chowder/ManhattanChowder.htm
--Cookbook writer and chef James Beard (1903-1985) described Manhattan clam chowder as: ". . . that rather horrendous soup called Manhattan clam chowder. . . resembles a vegetable soup soup that accidentally had some clams dumped into it."
--1939 - In February 1939, a bill was introduced by Assemblyman Seeder to the Maine legislature to make it a statutory and culinary offense to put tomatoes into chowder.
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