Sunday, April 29, 2012

Thick & Hearty Mushroom "Bisque"

I've been wanting to make more soups lately - they seem so easy and delicious...and healthy! This weekend I wanted to make a mushroom bisque but I didn't want an actual cream soup so I figured I would try to use a vegetable broth and then "cream" the soup by blending the soup at the end to make it thick and creamy. Worked like a charm and my soup was delicious!

Here's my recipe, pictures are below:

Ingredients:
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 large vidalia onion, finely diced
2 leeks, white part only, finely diced
20 oz (two 10 oz packages) crimini mushrooms, finely diced
1 pound shitake mushrooms, finely diced
1 Tbsp flour
1 1/2 tsp sea salt
2 Tbsp fresh thyme
4 cups mushroom (or other) broth
6 oz fat free yogurt
chives, to taste (1/2 tsp per serving)

Directions:
Chop onion and leeks into a very small dice. Heat olive oil and add onions/leeks, add 1/2 tsp salt and stir. Cover and cook over medium heat until soft, about 15 minutes.

While the onions/leeks are cooking down, clean and chop mushrooms. Chop them into as small a dice as you can. After onion mixture is soft, add mushrooms and sprinkle flour over (to thicken final soup), add thyme and rest of salt (1 tsp or to taste), stir well. Cover and cook about 10 minutes more until mushrooms are soft.

Add 4 cups of broth. I used mushroom broth for a deeper mushroom flavor, but any broth is fine. Cover and increase heat to high. Bring to a boil then lower heat and simmer for about 5 more minutes.

Turn off heat, remove cover and let cool for about 5 minutes before adding yogurt. Stir well to incorporate yogurt.

At this point you can leave as is for a more broth-like soup with chunks of mushrooms, or you can use an immersion blender to "cream" the soup a little, or you can go full "bisque" and use a blender to completely cream the soup. If you use a blender, do it in small batches so the hot soup doesn't explode up and burn you.

I used my immersion blender to cream the soup a little so my soup ended up thick and "creamy" but still had the chunks of mushrooms.

Serve while hot and snip some chives over the top. Yum!

Makes at least 8 1-cup servings.


mise en place

mushrooms added to the cooked onions

thyme - my favorite herb

gorgeous soup

a close up

yum!


Bye for now...

3 comments:

  1. That looks wonderful. I'm a huge mushroom fan! I too use the practice of pureeing the soup to give it that creamy texture (w/o adding cream). Last weekend I made a Broccoli/Spinach & Cheese Soup after watching an episode of America's Test Kitchen the week before. It's delicious. Check it out!

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  2. OMG...this is making me drool. It looks delicious. Even though it isn't really soup weather here, I think I'm going to make this tomorrow.

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  3. I just made this soup, and it is the best soup I've ever made. It is so delicious and filling. I couldn't find mushroom stock at my local store, so I used beef stock with low sodium. I had to add more salt and pepper (which probably negated the low sodium in the beef stock, lol), but otherwise, it turned out perfectly. Thanks for posting this recipe! I will definitely make this again.

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