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Hey everybody, I'm Marc Dunham.
Join us over the next few minutes as we make a mushroom and barley soup that's super delicious, and it's good
for you
right here on Play With Your Food.
Alright everybody welcome back.
We're going to make a real quick version of a mushroom barley soup. There's probably
a dozen different ways you can tackle this project,
but we're going to go back to last week's episode where we talked about
the par-cooked barley that I'll use again.
Most of you will use a par-cooked product.
I've got two pots here/ You should be able do this in one pot, but for the sake of time for
the video and for me not boring you to death we'll use two pots
just to speed it up.
In the back pot I've got barley that's already cooked.
It was the two to one ratio.
It's got a little bit of liquid left in it but it's soft. I don't know exactly how this is going to turn out, but that's
the point of all this is getting in here and just trying it.
I've never made a soup with par-cooked barley, but we're going to give it a shot.
I've got my front pan on.
It's ready to go.
Heating up at
low to medium low.
We'll go in with
a little bit of olive oil.
Just enough to coat the bottom of the pan.
And I've got some minced shallots.
Somebody asked me a couple days ago when I talk about minced what the size is?
A little bit smaller than an eighth of an inch, could be a 16th of an inch squared so
just small.
In go the shallots.
I'll give these guys a stir. When you hear a lot of action come out of the pan like that,
especially shallots and garlic,
that gives you a sign to kind of cool things down a little but so
take the pan off the heat if you need to, move it, just let it calm down a second.
So I'll turn down the heat.
Pan comes off the burner for a second, it's still cooking but it's not cooking so hot that it burns.
With the size of the shallots it's not going to take long for them to start to soften up.
I've got some
cremini mushrooms and you can use button mushrooms.
Button mushrooms don't have a
whole lot of flavor. Cremini mushrooms have little bit more flavor,
and if you want even more flavor
pick a wild mushroom.
And if you want a whole lot more flavor, you can make a mushroom stock, which we'll talk about in a second.
I put this much mushrooms in so it doesn't crowd the pan.
It's probably about a cup, cup and a half.
A little bit of salt.
Little bit of pepper.
I guess I mean a little bit.
I didn't pack
quite enough pepper here.
Mushrooms you don't want to cook over too high heat so low to medium-low heat is good for mushrooms.
If you want to get a crispy exterior then maybe a little bit higher, but if you get too high with mushrooms,
in my experience or at least my preference, they get too chewy and rubbery.
I know I'll have some people out there disagreeing, that's fine. Okay so these are in the pan and will sweat down a
little bit.
I'll let these cook a couple minutes. Let's go back and
talk about the barley here, I'll try to tilt this up so you can see it
without burning myself.
So we've got the barley in here and I had about
a cup of barley.
So I added
2 cups
of water,
a pinch of salt,
simmered it has per the directions for
about 10 minutes and there is still a little liquid in there.
So if you were doing this step-by-step without having to the barley separate,
you would proceed with this step with the mushrooms here.
These guys will start to soften up a little bit.
And again I would cook these for probably another four or five minutes, but in the effort to speed this up
I'll go in with
a little bit of wine.
The wine's going to add
an acidic component to the overall soup.
That cooled down the pan a little so I'll adjust the heat.
You want to let the wine reduce just a touch and what that means is basically just cooking off the alcohol
so that you don't have that alcohol flavor left in the soup because it's not very tasty.
That's coming up to a simmer.
I'll go ahead and go in this pot with
the barley.
And here's the guessing game now since I've never done this is
basically how much water we'll have to add to this to make it
a soup.
If you've got a recipe that's fine, but the point is if you don't have a recipe just use some common sense.
Turn down the flame.
I'll add water. If you want to use vegetable stock, chicken stock, that's fine. If you're concerned about it being
vegetarian, water or vegetable stock works fine.
Consistency wise,
that looks pretty good for me for soup.
I'll turn this back up.
It'll come up to a simmer.
I'll chop some rosemary real quick.
Thank you honey for the new knife.
I really like thyme also with mushrooms. It's
pretty delicious.
Rosemary will work.
Any kind of
wintery herb that's a little bit firmer
will give this soup
a little more flavor.
You don't need
that much rosemary,
same with thyme,
because they're both pretty aggressive in flavor.
I'll go back and I know I'll have to add a little more salt.
And I know I'll have to add a little more pepper.
This is going to come up to a simmer
and basically it's done in terms of cooking because the mushrooms are soft,
the barley's soft.
Cooking it longer
really isn't going to do a whole lot for you, it's just going to make the mushrooms
more soft and the barley softer and
gummy and gross.
That's the good thing about this soup is once it comes up to a simmer and you taste it
and it tastes good
you're done.
I'll bring that up to a simmer.
I'll give this broth a taste
real quick.
I can taste the wine, I can taste the mushrooms.
If you want to get a more aggressive mushroom flavor I would recommend one or two things. You can make a mushroom stock
and how you can do that
if you're going to the store and all they have are portobellos, creminis and white button mushrooms,
by the
big portobellos
and take the stems off.
Clean up the stems,
Put them into a pot with a little bit of butter and cook those down a little bit,
cover with water
and simmer that for about 45 minutes
and you have mushroom broth.
So that mushroom broth
can be used as the base for this soup.
Another way to do it is
to buy dried mushrooms from the store,
cover those with water,
simmer for about 10 or 15 minutes,
you have mushroom broth.
If you don't want to do either one of those you can buy mushroom broth.
But that will give you a more aggressive mushroom flavor.
If you're not so interested in that
use water or vegetable stock.
That's come up
to a simmer.
I'll taste it one more time for salt content.
Maybe just a touch more.
That's it.
That was quick.
Super easy.
And it's delicious. This kind of soup sticks to your ribs too.
Nice
full barley flavor.
It's really pretty too. I like the way barley looks.
It's got a unique white blend and then all of a sudden that dark streak down the middle of
the grain.
And that's it. Mushroom and barley soup
in about 10 or 15 minutes.
Join us next week where we get together to cook some more recipes.