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.
Over the weekend, Bill from Clarion River Organics sent us home with a pound of Chicken of the Woods. We’ve been really happy with how our Vegan BBQ turned out for Steve’s Deli and were eager to try some similar techniques in a grab and go sandwich.
We browned some chopped leeks and garlic in a tablespoon of olive oil until translucent, and then added the mushrooms, lemon thyme, salt, pepper, and tarragon to the pot with a few hefty pours of white wine. We covered and simmered until the Chicken of the Woods was tender, roughly 10 minutes.
For the rest of the mixture we stayed fairly basic: Just Mayo, lemon juice, grapes, raw leeks, and a few added tarragon leaves. The texture was perfect for the most part. Both sandwiches had a one or two dry bites, not sure if it was the result of not enough liquid or just past the prime for some of the mushrooms. All in all, a solid start. Can’t wait to try more!
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.
Disclaimer: I am no banh mi expert. At best an “enthusiast”, but only because I had a political philosophy teacher in college that would moonlight as a food critic and had a pretty extensive section on his blog about his personal journey to find the best banh mi. So thats out of the way.
We’ve still been pretty hot on trying to nail down a contender for the perfect Steve’s Deli vegan sandwich. As far as sandwiches go, the banh mi is the perfect balancing act of flavor and texture. Sweet, spicy, refreshing, and piled high with pork. Forgive us for our trespasses as we attempt to ditch the hog and make it through to the other side with a dark horse for the menu.
So we’ve gone (very temporarily) vegan. I’d like to say that it is in response to the shame I feel from a week of road trip food and a recent stuffed-crust-pizza-breakdown (YOLO). But in reality, we’re seriously lacking in a vegan option for the Steve’s Deli menu and I do my best work under tight constraints.
