While we’re stuck in Steve’s Deli limbo, we’ve been trying to enjoy the freedom of living without a constant stream of nearly-expired sandwich fixings. Turns out that you can go wild at the grocery store without breaking the bank if you barricade yourself in the produce aisle and pretend that cheese doesn’t exist. After scooping up a handful of ramps for our local co-op, we decided to savor the last few chilly nights of the year and make a mushroom barley soup.
We’re not always the best at uncomplicated cooking, so lazy dinner nights normally end in take out. This time, we decided to do some strategizing and prep the soup beforehand, leaving the stock to marinate in the circulator. Packed with a medley of mushrooms and garlic, it turned out bright and earthy while still being surprisingly filling.
Bright and earthy vegan mushroom soup with fresh ramps, barley, and radishes.
Author: Disturbing the Peas
Recipe type: Soup
Cuisine: American
Ingredients
1 cup black barley
2 cups assorted mushrooms (shitake, oyster, and enoki)
4 bay leaves
1 tablespoon kosher salt, plus more
4 large eggs (optional)
2 small radishes, trimmed, thinly sliced
1 bunch ramps
Walnut oil, white wine vinegar, salt and pepper to season
Instructions
The night before you make the soup, go down and grab a beer and remember you've gotta soak the barley. Cover 1 cup barley with 3 cups of cold water and leave overnight.
The next evening, set the circulator to 68*C
While that's heating up you strain the barley and reserve the soaking liquid
Place the barley in rice cooker with mushroom stems and bay leaves and the appropriate amount of water.
Put in reserved barley water (2.5ish cups) into a vaccuum bag with mushrooms, black garlic, onion, bay leaves, and kombu and place in the circulator. If you have extra mushrooms lying around, toss them in! In this case, more is more. Optional: sweat the onions and half the mushrooms for a bit before bagging.
Have a glass of wine and relax! If you prefer a more protein rich version of this soup, toss some eggs into the circulator, they should be perfectly cooked once the broth is ready.
minutes before you serve, prep mushrooms, radishes, ice and peel the eggs, and quickly saute the ramps.
To serve: nestle and barley in a bowl, then top with radishes and mushrooms. Pour broth over the bowl and season as desired. We used a sprinkle of vinegar and walnut oil.
As winter drudges on I find myself spending my lunch hour curled up by a space heater at my desk oggling photo after photo of soup on pinterest. One recipe in particular kept stopping me in my tracks, a cluster of vegetable based soups in bright technicolor that promised to detoxify my liver. Since I have been forced to adhere to high carb diet, our pantry was stocked with sweet potatoes so I thought I’d try my luck with this alluring orange number.
I’ll cut straight the chase on this one before we dive into the particulars. When you see a bowl of food this beautiful that also promises to rid your body of any number of toxins, the author probably hasn’t actually eaten it. If they have, I’m not really sure what their definition of “soup” is. I will categorize this more as “healthy” mashed potatoes, a little too sweet for my tastes with a one note flavor that had me fantasizing about Hearty Cheeseburger Soup by the time I’d made it through a quarter of the bowl. Yeah, thats right, Hearty Cheeseburger Soup.
We made a few alterations to the original recipe as we went along, the most important of which was the cook time and temperature of the vegetables. The original recipe called to cook for 20 minutes at 329*, which after the timer went off I realized was completely insane. We upped the temperature and roasted for an additional 40 minutes. I’d recommend starting off at 400* and roasting for an hour at a minimum.
In the end I wish we had introduced more liquid and more heat to the soup. A little cayenne went a long way on making it more palatable, and I wish I had had the foresight to blend in more stock or coconut milk to improve the consistency. Overall I think it is a promising base that, while easy on the eyes, could use a bit of massaging before I’d recommend it as a memorable soup.
Fresh parsley, 1 teaspoon coconut milk, to garnish
Instructions
Heat the oven to 400*
Line a baking sheet with baking paper, add the sweet potato, carrots, parsnip, onion, and garlic, season with salt, chili, turmeric, and cumin, add the coconut oil and toss to combine.
Roast for 1 hour then transfer into the blender.
Add the warm vegetable broth, grated ginger, and cooked red lentils into the blender and process to obtain a smooth cream.
Make great soup from the odds and ends of your kitchen
The vacmaster is great in all but one way. You know the feeling that you should save scraps of stuff to make soup with later, that gets worse. a lot worse.
We cleaned out the freezer and found about a year’s worth of badly labeled and mystery bags of potential soup bases and finally tried it. There’s some country ham and barley stock, some cheese rinds, some ends of rye bread, carrot solids, pear juice, beef bones, country ham ends, etc.
We had some duck leftover from Valentimes Day, so that was going to be used too. We had carrots, jalapenos, and cilantro quietly waiting in the back of the fridge huddled together waiting for garbage night.
Nothing would be wasted tonight. We were finally making garbage soup. Sort of cheating though, since some of the the garbage we had was soup stock. oh well. From the stuff in the fridge, we decided to make it pho ish. but use whatever the stock came out as. I threw in some pho seasoning and dumped all the stuff into the pressure cooker.
About an hour later I strained out a delicious stock. Rich and meaty. Dense, hearty, crazy flavorful. Layer noodles, duck, soon to be rotten vegetables, pour over nearly thrown away stock and whoosh, you’ve got dinner for two days and lunch one day. The smug satisfaction from not wasting anything lasts forever.
We didn’t do too well with tomatoes this year. In my old apartment I had a pretty big garden and could plant twenty or so plants to guard against about a third of them not really producing too much fruit. Here there’s not much room for any of that. We were going to build a raised bed planter and started doing that, but found out that dirt is surprisingly expensive and got a couple large pots instead. So, I’ve got two tomato plants and a hankering for gazpacho. Not willing to use every tomato that we’ve grown in one bowl of soup. I had to buy them.
Well, at least we’re bookended by farmers markets these days. Oops I missed the Thursday one, better wait until the Saturday one right next door. Or sometimes you miss both of them and you just go to the grocery store. Oh well.
I thought I’d try making a vegetable stock sous vide, tossing some olive oil with basil and olive oil with red pepper flakes and smoked paprika into the circulator, and doing the ideas in food cryo blanch trick to the tomatoes (There’s a seriouseats article too). I cut up onion, celery and carrots browned them a bit, then put them in a bag with a few ice cubes (since things were hot and I didn’t want the water to boil out in the vacuum machine) and some savory. I put that in the water bath at 70C ish. Also put in the flavored oils.
The tomatoes went into the freezer in a bag, salted. I waited about an hour, took the tomatoes out and thawed them a little then back to the freezer. This is to create large ice splinters that pop the tomoato cells and let you get more of the tomato taste out. I didn’t do a side by side or anything to see if it’s worth it. It’s not really that much extra effort, I was waiting for the stock anyways.
After about three hours I pulled out the stock, strained it, thawed the tomatoes in the circulator water. Put both into the blender, strained, strained, added a dark piece of toast and some cream, blended then seasoned, blended again. I probably put some fish sauce in there too.
Bowl soup, drizzle oils, plop with greek yogurt. The oils made it rich, and varied the flavor bite to bite. The tomatoes tasted fresh and bright. Then the nearly burned bread and smoky paprika brought it all together. It was pretty great. Suggested pairing: spicy grilled cheese and vernors.
Meet Maggie & Ed
Cat Enthusiasts, Amateur Contractors, Professional Cheese Eaters.
We cleaned out the freezer and found about a year’s worth of badly labeled and mystery bags of potential soup bases and finally tried it. There’s some country ham and barley stock, some cheese rinds, some ends of rye bread, carrot solids, pear juice, beef bones, country ham ends, etc.
