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Hi everybody. Welcome back to City Suppers. I'm Tim Anderson, Master Chef champion, and
today I'm going to show you some real American comfort food. Beer and cheese soup, with mushrooms.
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So, we're going to start with some garlic, which we'll crush and roughly chop. Give it
a smash with your knife. The peel should come right off and just run your knife through
it. Everything will get pureed later, with the blender, so don't worry about it being
perfect little pieces. Then we've got some sun-dried tomatoes. Now, if you don't have
these on hand you don't have to use them, but they do add a really nice sort of rich
deep sweetness and some good umami, as well. So if you have them on hand, absolutely throw
them in there. Just roughly chop these, like the garlic.
There we go. Now, I'm from Wisconsin, which is in northern Mid-West of The United States,
and Wisconsin is known as America's dairy land. That's our nickname. It's on our license
plates. What that means is, of course, we're famous for cheese. And our largest city, Milwaukee,
is nicknamed 'Brew City,' so of course it's famous for beer. And this dish combines the
best of both. It's really really sweet and malty and a little bit bitter from the beer
and rich and creamy and salty and tangy from the cheese. Absolutely delicious. Not very
healthy, but doesn't matter. Got about 25 grams of butter here. Going to throw that
in to a deep sauce pan. Once the butter is melted, and nice and hot, we'll add our garlic
and sun-dried tomatoes, and let them cook gently until soft. This is going to smell
amazing! And, we're also going to add some oregano. Now, you don't have to add this,
it's purely optional, but it does add something lovely and herbaceous to it. Marjoram, also
good. Thyme, if you have it. Or herbs de Provence, perhaps. They all work well. If you think
you would like to try this, check the full list of ingredients in the description box.
So here I've got some dried mushrooms, these are dried portobella mushrooms, but dried
porcini or even dried shitake work great as well. I've brought them to a boil in about
100 ml of water and then let them soak for 10 to 15 minutes so they plump up and you
get a lovely mushroom broth out of them. So, I'm going to add the broth and the mushrooms
themselves in to the mixture here. And then add about 15 grams of flower. Now this is
going to be, basically, a sort of bechamel base for our cheese soup. Now give that a
whisk. Make sure the flour doesn't clump up. Once the flour and the mushroom broth is nicely
mixed, bring it up to the boil and then we'll add the rest of our liquid. About 100 ml of
milk, straight in there, and the same amounts of beer. Now, in terms of what beer to use,
just about anything will do. You don't want anything too hoppy, or bitter, because that
bitterness will actually intensify as it cooks, but a nice light golden ale or even an average
lager will do. You really just want that nice malty toasty flavor.
So that goes in, and we whisk it all together. It smells like a brewery in here right now.
So, our soup base is simmering away, it's smelling absolutely gorgeous. But, of course,
it's not finished yet. We have one last thing to add. It's the cheese. I've got about 200
grams of cheese here. This is mature cheddar, but any kind of good, strong cheese will do.
Comte, eemental, grueyere all of them would be absolutely lovely. So we'll just add that
by the handful.
So the soup is good to go until we're ready to puree it and make it lovely and smooth.
So we'll work on the mushrooms. And I've got some oyster mushroom here, which have a nice
almost fruity sweet aroma to them. They're great, and they'll be perfect for this, but
any kind of mushrooms will do. Now, I'm just going to tare these up in to roughly bite
size pieces. Most of these are pretty small already. So I'll leave them as they are. And
I'll get some olive oil in a pan, like so. Celery. Celery I think just has a nice, lovely,
herbaceous aroma that compliments the richer flavors in this dish, quite well. So, we'll
cut it length wise in to four pieces.
So oil is nice and hot and we're going to cook the celery and the mushrooms together.
They don't need a lot of cooking. We want both of them to have some bite left to them.
And we'll just season with salt, pepper, and why not, some Worcestershire sauce. This gives
a nice acidity, doesn't it? Works great with mushrooms.
So, if you like what you see. Want to see more? Just remember to click subscribe. So,
we're just about there. The mushrooms are looking just about good actually, they don't
take long to cook at all. We're going to take the heat down on those. And we're going to
return to our soup, which is already looking all creamy and thick and lovely. We're going
to give it a blitz with a hand blender. If you don't have a hand blender, stick it in
a normal blender, even a food processor will do.
But this is very convenient. Less washing up.
Don't worry if it's not perfectly smooth after blending because we're going to be passing
it through a sieve so it's really really nice and creamy. Oh yeah. It's like a delicious
cheese and beer gravy thing, with mushrooms. Alright. So, just work this through your sieve.
You can see how smooth and beautiful it is on the other side. By the way, this sieving,
it's a little bit of a tedious job, but it's worth it. It makes it look, and feel, and
taste much better.
So we pressed out all that lovely creamy soup from the fibrous bits. Now I'm just going
to do a real quick chefy trick on this. It's completely optional, but it just makes it
look nicer and it improves the texture, I think, a bit. And that's to incorporate air
in to it, so it's really nice and frothy. It's basically like whipping it.
All you have to do is hold the blender, so it's slightly sticking out of the surface
of the liquid and you can see all these bubbles get whipped in to it.
We're just about good to go. There's just a couple garnishes, one of which is chives,
for that nice oniony flavor and of course a little bit of color. And, to serve with
it, some good crusty bread. Nice thick slice. [knife cutting through bread]
There we go. Let's dish up.
This is amazing comfort food. Perfect for a cold wet day. Now, we'll spoon in our mushrooms
and celery.
One finishing touch, and this is optional as well, a little bit of truffle oil. Now,
do be careful with this because it can really overpower the dish. Literally a few drops,
then the chives, and our nice crusty bread. And there you have it. Beer and cheese soup,
with mushrooms. A Wisconsin classic. I hope to see you again for another episode in my
City Suppers series.
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