Category: Inspiration

Steaks Sous Vides – The Perfect Steak

It doesn’t get much better than this people.

If you’ve spent much time reading this blog, you know that I’m all about temperature, because temperature is the only reliable way to gauge how your food is going to turn out.

Of course temperature and heat are different things.  Heat is about how much energy you’re putting into your food whereas temperature is a way to read how much heat is in food already.

Think about it like this:  If you decide to slow-roast a piece of meat on your smoker or in your oven at a low temperature over a period of hours, you’re putting a little bit of heat into it over a long period of time.  Conversely, if you sear a steak over a hot grill or in a hot cast iron pan, you’re putting a lot of heat into it very rapidly.

The reason it’s hard to cook that perfect steak, which is medium rare bumper to bumper with a crusty, golden edge is because there’s almost no way to cook it on low enough heat for it to turn out truly perfect.  Even slowly bringing your steak up to temperature in a 200°F oven before searing it (the method I generally recommend) is going to leave striations of doneness to a small degree.  Put too much heat in and it’ll be a bullseye of doneness with only the very center cooked correctly.

Enter the Sous Vide cooker – the solution to all of your protein problems.  No more striations of doneness, no more raw centers, no more accidentally-well-done food.  Just perfect, all the time.

How does this work?  Basically, when you cook something sous vide you hold the entire piece of protein at exactly the temperature you want for an extended period of time so no matter how much time it takes, you never overcook it.

So, what exactly is sous vide?  Sous vide is the process of cooking something in a water bath which is set to an exact temperature.  Essentially, what you do is you vacuum seal you protein in a plastic bag, either using a vacuum sealer or the water displacement method (I use the latter method; it’s cheaper and has never caused me any problems) to get all the air out of the bag and drop it in a pot of water that’s being held at a constant temperature until it’s cooked through; then you simply finish it off over high heat to sear the outside and there you have it – perfectly cooked food.

This is, in fact, the way high end steakhouses typically cook their steak.  Ever wonder how a table of five can order three different cuts of steak, one rare, two medium-rare, one medium, and one medium-well and they all arrive at the table at the same time, perfectly cooked, exactly as ordered, edge to edge?  The answer is sous vide.  They’ve had those steaks sitting in different water baths at different temperatures for hours, waiting to be finished off on a hot grill and brought to your table.

That’s the secret.

You can achieve these results at home too.  There are three ways to do this:

  1. Stove top method.  Heat water in a large pot to exactly the temperature you want, verify using a thermometer, and constantly fiddle with the temperature for hours until you’ve got whatever it is you’re making cooked through.  Forget it.  Too much time, too hard.
  2. Beer Cooler method.  This works astonishingly well.  Essentially, you get your water bath to a few degrees higher than your cooking temperature and the insulated walls of the cooler should hold your water at a relatively constant temperature for a few hours; long enough to cook a steak.  J. Kenji Lopez-Alt describes the process here.
  3. Purchase a sous vide immersion circulator.  It used to be that these things were too pricey for the average home cook, but due to the popularity of the sous vide method of cooking they are becoming increasingly affordable.  Generally, they’ll run you anywhere from $75-$150.  I got mine at Aldi for $49.99.  So far so good.

No matter what method you use, you really owe it to yourself to try cooking something sous vide the next time you have a couple hours.  Here’s a short recipe for the steak featured above.

Ingredients

For the Garlic-Herb Butter:

  1. 1 stick salted (yeah, i know) butter, room temperature
  2. 3 tablespoons fresh parsley, minced
  3. 2 tablespoons fresh basil, minced
  4. 3 sprigs fresh thyme, minced
  5. 2 cloves garlic, smashed into a paste (or squished in a garlic press)

For the Steak:

  1. 2 steaks (filet, strip, or ribeye), 1.5 – 2 inches thick (the thicker the better, ask your butcher to cut you a few steaks if the ones in the case are less than 1.5 inches thick – remember, you’re searing these off at the end and it is possible to overcook your steak during that process).
  2. 2 cloves garlic, smashed
  3. Fresh herbs (such as rosemary, thyme, etc), optional
  4. Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Instructions:

For the Garlic-Herb Butter:

  1. Mix all ingredients together in a small bowl until very well combined.
  2. Using plastic wrap, roll the butter into a log shape and twist the ends off (like a tootsie roll)
  3. Refrigerate until needed.

For the Steak:

  1.  Heat a water bath to 130°F for medium rare (135° for medium, anything past that forget the whole sous vide thing and just incinerate it on your stovetop; it’s easier that way).
  2. Season steaks generously with salt and pepper.  Toss each steak individually in a food-grade gallon size freezer bag along with the smashed garlic clove and herbs, if using.
  3. Using the water displacement method, seal the steaks in their bags.
  4. Introduce steaks to water bath and make sure they’re fully submerged, weighing them down if necessary.
  5. Hold steaks in the water bath at a constant temperature for at least 2 hours and not more than 4 hours.
  6. Remove steaks from bags and pat very dry with paper towels (Note:  they will look really weird – grayish brown and mushy – after coming out of the water bath; don’t worry, all is well).
  7. Sear the steaks over high heat, either in a cast-iron pan or ripping hot grill (surface temperature of heating surface should be 400°F – 500°F), 15-30 seconds per side.
  8. Remove steaks from heating surface and allow to rest; while resting, top steaks with sliced rounds of garlic herb butter and tent lightly with foil until butter is melted, 3-5 minutes
  9. Slice and serve

 

The Best, Easiest Roast Chicken

 

Stick with me on this one people:  Trust me.

If you do, you will be rewarded with the juiciest, tenderest most succulent chicken with the crispiest, most delicious crackling skin you’ve ever had.

A good roast chicken should be both simple and delicious rather than fussy and difficult.  The method described in this post is, in my opinion, hands down the best way to roast a chicken.  In fact, it’s so easy, so good and so delicious that it is now the only way I roast a chicken.  Here’s the how and the why:

The traditional method of roasting a chicken involves stuffing the cavity, trussing the bird, and placing it breast side up in a deep roasting pan and roasting it at 325°F for about two hours.  This method is time consuming, and poses an additional problem:  Uneven cooking. 

You see, you want the chicken breasts to be moist and delicious, and you don’t really want pink thighs and drums.  But when you place a whole chicken in a roasting pan, the breasts are exposed to the full force of the oven’s heat, while the drums and thighs are deep in the roasting pan.  This means that the breasts are getting incinerated into dry stringy bits of grossness while the thighs and drums take their sweet time coming up to temp. 

I’ve seen all kinds of attempts to solutions to the problem, all the way from icing down the breasts first to constantly rotating the bird in the oven (which, by the way, every time you open the oven door your oven loses 25° worth of heat and you extend the process to like 3 hours or more).

What if I told you there was a way to perfectly roast a chicken in less than an hour? Well, there is…

You may observe that the chicken in the cover picture looks a bit… flat.  That’s because it is.  In fact, it’s had its backbone removed and it’s been flipped over, breast-side up. 

A lot of people refer to this process as butterflying or spatchcocking.  It’s very simple to do. 

To spatchcock your chicken, use the following procedure:

  1. Remove your chicken from its bag and retrieve giblets and whatever else might be hiding in the cavity of the chicken.  Pat the chicken dry and transfer it to a large cutting board.
  2. If there are any giant pieces of skin or blobs of fat protruding from the tail end or neck end, trim them off.
  3. Place the chicken breast-side down on the cutting board, with the neck closest to you.
  4. Locate the chicken’s neck and tail, and feel along the back of the chicken to get an idea of where the backbone is (measure twice, cut once).
  5. Using a sharp boning knife or a sturdy set of kitchen or poultry sheers, remove the backbone from the chicken by starting on one side of the neck and snipping all the way down the spine to the tail.  Repeat on the other side.
  6. Snip the backbone into three pieces and reserve for making stock or a pan sauce
  7. Flip the chicken over breast-side up, and make sure the legs and thighs are flipped in such a way as to be fully exposed (like in the picture), not under the chicken.
  8. Using firm pressure, press down with your palm on the center of the chicken’s breast until it’s pretty flat, like you’re giving it CPR.  You may or may not hear the breastbone pop, but the idea here is to get it as flat as possible.
  9. Place your chicken breast-side up on a wire rack over a rimmed baking sheet that has been lined with aluminum foil.  You can put some lemon wedges under your chicken if you like.

Now, you ask, why have you gone to all the trouble of doing this?  Well, aside from making carving a cinch, having this nice flat chicken sitting on top of a wire rack rather than deep in a roasting pan means that the whole bird will come up to temperature at roughly the same rate.  In fact, pop the chicken into a 400°F – 450°F oven for about 45 minutes and, lo and behold, the breasts will be getting finished right around the time the thighs are up to temperature.  You’ve just saved yourself at least 90 minutes and your chicken will be juicy through and through.

A Word on Chicken and Temperature

If you’ve read enough of the posts on this blog you should have figured out by now that we always cook using temperature not time.  Speaking of temperature, the poor chicken is probably the most overcooked item on anyone’s regular rotation.  The reason for this is that chickens can house some really nasty bugs, not the least of which are salmonella and e. coli, both of which will leave you wretching up your guts for a few days – best case scenario.  Because we’re aware of this, we generally follow the USDA guidelines and roast our chicken until the internal temperature of the breast is 165°F and the thighs are 180°F – meaning that they are dry and sad and horrible, like this guy:

It does also, however, mean that even a total idiot can cook a chicken or a turkey and not poison anyone.  And that’s the audience that the USDA is shooting for: the general public, the total idiots, the lowest common denominator.  And that’s fine, because as a government organization, that’s their job – to protect the general public from themselves.

However, that is not my job.  My job is to help you get the juiciest, most delicious, succulent bird on the table that you can.  If you’re reading this blog, I’m assuming that you’re not a total idiot (if you are, and you’re still reading this blog, God help you).

So here’s the thing:  It’s not like salmonella (or anything bacteria, virus, amoeba, what have you) are alive at one temperature and then suddenly dead at the next.  The process of pasteurization, that is, the process of ensuring that food born pathogens are eliminated from food, is a matter of both time and temperature.  So the FDA (also a government organization whose job is to keep us safe from ourselves, but in this case it applies to restaurants and food vendors and producers, not individuals) has this to say about pasteurization and poultry:

FDA Pasteurization Time for Poultry

Temperature (°F)

Chicken

Turkey

13663.3 Minutes64.0 Minutes
14025.2 Minutes28.1 Minutes
1458.4 Minutes10.5 Minutes
1502.7 Minutes3.8 Minutes
15544.2 Seconds1.2 Minutes
16013.7 Seconds25.6 Seconds
165Instant<10 Seconds

What you will notice here is that the USDA recommends going all the way to 165°F because at that temperature, it’s a pretty much guaranteed fail-safe.  It’s also guaranteed nasty, dried out bird.  Bottom line here?  According to the FDA, a chicken that’s been held at 145°F for 8.4 minutes is every bit as safe to eat as a bird roasted to within an inch of incineration to 165°F.

Of course, 145°F for a chicken is a little on the rare side; it’ll still be a bit pink and gelatinous and people will know it isn’t cooked – at least to what they’re used to.  My recommendation is to insert a probe thermometer into the thickest, coldest part of your chicken when you put it into the oven, wait for it to hit 150°F, set a timer for 5 minutes, then pull it out of the oven.  That way, you’re well within FDA recommendations and just in case your probe thermometer is off by a degree or two or you didn’t get it all the way into the thickest, coldest part of your bird, you’ll still be fine.  I’ve been doing it this way for years and I’ve never poisoned anyone.  Do verify, using an Instant Read Thermometer, that BOTH the breast AND the joint between the leg and thigh BOTH read at least 150°F.

Okay.  With all that out of the way, here’s the recipe:

Ingredients:

For the Chicken:

  1. 1 Whole Chicken approximately 5 lbs (you can do two if you like, just make sure they’re about the same weight)
  2. Olive oil

 


For the Poultry Rub

  1. 2 teaspoons Kosher Salt
  2. 2 teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper
  3. 2 teaspoons MSG (yeah, yeah, it’s not gonna kill you, it’s perfectly safe, omit if you like, just double the salt… but trust me on this, use the MSG, sold as Accent and available in the spices section of most grocery stores)
  4. 2 teaspoons granulated garlic
  5. 2 teaspoons dried mustard
  6. 2 teaspoons dried powdered oregano
  7. 1 teaspoon dried thyme
  8. 1 teaspoon dried basil
  9. 1 teaspoon paprika
  10. 2 teaspoons baking powder (optional, for extra-crispy skin)

Special Equipment

  1. Wire rack set above baking sheet.  (Line baking sheet with foil for easy clean up.  No wire rack?  Use a grill grate).
  2. Probe thermometer
  3. Poultry sheers, sharp boning knife, or really sturdy scissors

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 450°F.  Arrange rack to be in the upper two-thirds of the oven.
  2. Combine poultry rub ingredients and whisk or shake to combine thoroughly.
  3. Spatchcock chicken according to instructions at beginning of post.
  4. Gently separate skin from breasts, thighs and legs by working your fingers underneath.  Leave in place though, do not remove.
  5. Drizzle chicken with olive oil; just enough for there to be something for the rub to stick to.  Season chicken with poultry rub from Step 2, above.  Be sure to get some of the rub underneath the skin also.
  6. Transfer chicken to wire rack on rimmed baking sheet.  Use an instant read thermometer to find the coldest part of the chicken breast.  Insert probe thermometer here.
  7. Place chicken into the oven, legs toward the back, and roast for 10 to 15 minutes.  Reduce oven temperature to 400°F and roast chicken until probe thermometer reads 150°F.  Turn off oven, set timer for 5 minutes.  Remove chicken and verify that the other breast and the joint between the thighs and legs on both sides are also at least 150°F.
  8. Let rest 10 minutes, then carve and serve.  Carry over cooking will bring your bird up to at least 155°F while resting, and that’s good enough for me.

Just look at the finished product:

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

If you’d like to make a pan sauce, do the following while your chicken is in the oven:

Ingredients (This is more of a method than anything else, use what you like or what you have on hand):

  1. 1 tablespoon butter
  2. 2 tablespoons olive oil
  3. Kosher Salt and Freshly Ground Black Pepper
  4. 3 chicken backbone pieces
  5. A few shallots, or 1/2 of a minced onion
  6. 2-3 cloves garlic
  7. 1 cup dry white wine or chicken stock
  8. Handful of fresh herbs
  9. Juice of 1 lemon

Instructions:

  1. Melt 1 tablespoon butter and 2 tablespoons olive oil in a 10-12 inch stainless steel skillet or sauté pan over medium-high heat.
  2. Season the chicken backbone pieces aggressively with Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper.
  3. Once the pan is hot, add the chicken backbone pieces (remember those?) skin side down and sear until golden brown.  Allow to cook in the pan, undisturbed for 4-5 minutes – brown means brown.
  4. Once well browned, flip the backbone pieces over and continue to cook another 2-3 minutes and allow fat to render.
  5. Remove backbone pieces – you should now how some lovely fond built up in the bottom of your pan
  6. Add a few shallots or 1/2 a minced onion to the pan and sweat, scraping up the fond as the onion releases its moisture
  7. Add 2-3 minced garlic cloves and sauté with onion until fragrant
  8. Deglaze the pan with a cup or so of dry white wine or chicken stock and allow to reduce by 2/3
  9. Add a handful of fresh herbs (parsley, cilantro, thyme, whatever) along with the juice of a lemon (for acid) and continue to cook for another 2 minutes over low heat, or until sauce coats the back of a spoon and streaks the bottom of the pan when a spoon is dragged through it.
  10. Serve sauce over chicken.

Boeuf Bourguignon

Another beautiful rustic French classic, the method for this dish bears a resemblance to Traditional Coq Au Vin.  When I made this for the first time, I followed Julia Child’s recipe to the letter, and I remember thinking about halfway through the process “This woman was insane.”  Now that I’ve made it a few times, I actually don’t think she was that crazy – it takes a bit of practice to get it down, but actually despite the fact that the whole process takes about 5 hours, there’s really probably only about 90 minutes of active time.  Still, it’s not the kind of thing you can whip up on a week night; you’ll have to wait for a day off to make it, but most of that day can be spent relaxing or doing other things while the delicious smell of beef braised in red wine permeates your home.

This recipe follows Julia’s recipe very closely, but has a few tweaks that are mainly to my personal preference, including the addition of celery and also an umami bomb.

Time: 5 hours (90 minutes inactive)
Level: Advanced
Cost: About $5.00 per plate
Serves: 6

Ingredients

  1.  Approximately 3 lbs chuck roast, trimmed of any fat or gristle, but left in large pieces
  2. Kosher Salt and Freshly Ground Black Pepper
  3. Vegetable or grape seed oil
  4. 12oz thick-cut bacon, sliced into lardons
  5. 1/4 cup all purpose flour
  6. 1 14oz can low sodium beef stock, divided
  7. 4 stalks celery, cut into 1 inch pieces
  8. 5 carrots, peeled and cut into 1 inch pieces
  9. 1 large onion, sliced
  10. 3 cloves garlic
  11. 3 tablespoons tomato paste
  12. 2 tablespoons soy sauce
  13. 1 tablespoon anchovy paste
  14. 2 bay leaves
  15.  Several sprigs fresh parsley
  16.  Several sprigs fresh thyme
  17. 1 750ml bottle dry red wine (cheap is fine, I use Aldi’s Winking Owl shiraz, $2.59)
  18. 12 small boiler onions
  19. 8 oz crimini or baby bella mushrooms, halved if large
  20. 1 shot brandy
  21. 2 lbs small roasting potatoes (which will actually be boiled)
  22. 1/2 cup chopped parsley, for garnishing

Prep and Mise En Place

  1. Preheat oven to 400°F
  2. Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil (like you would for pasta)
  3. Prepare mirepoix (celery, onions, carrots) and combine in a medium bowl
  4. Prepare umami bomb (soy sauce, tomato paste, anchovy paste) and combine in a small bowl
  5. Mince garlic and reserve in a small bowl
  6. Trim beef and season aggressively with Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
  7. Slice bacon
  8. Measure out flour
  9. Open can of beef stock
  10. Open bottle of wine
  11. Prepare Bouquet Garni:  bundle thyme, parsley and bay leaves together and wrap in cheesecloth (a coffee filter tied shut will work in a pinch)
  12. Slice the stem end (not the root end) off the boiler onions but leave them unpeeled
  13. Prepare mushrooms
  14. Measure out shot of brandy

Instructions

  1. Blanch boiler onions (not sliced ones) in boiling water for 7 minutes, remove with a slotted spoon and, using a colander rinse under cold running water until cool.  Once cool, pinch the ends to peel onions under running water; the skins should slide right off.  Remove root end of onions with a paring knife, transfer to a bowl, and refrigerate.
  2. Blanch bacon in boiling water for 10 minutes, remove with a slotted spoon, and transfer to a plate lined with paper towels.  Pat dry.  (You want it dry – the more water there is in/on the bacon, the more angry popping and spattering you’ll get when you fry it).
  3. Into a large sauté pan over medium heat: Add two tablespoons of vegetable or grape seed oil along with bacon to a large saute pan and fry bacon until brown and slightly crispy, 5-7 minutes.  Remove bacon with a slotted spoon and transfer to a plate with paper towels to blot up some of the grease
  4. Over high heat, brown beef in large chunks in bacon fat, approximately 2.5 – 3 minutes per side, until nicely browned and a lovely fond begins to form on the bottom of the pan.  Remove beef to a cutting board and allow to cool.
  5. Add mirepoix (celery, onions, and carrots) to the pan.  Reduce heat to medium.  Sweat vegetables; as they begin to give up some of their moisture scrape up the fond from the bottom of the pan and incorporate.  If vegetables don’t give up enough moisture or fond threatens to burn, lower the heat and deglaze pan with a bit of liquid – stock, wine, or water.  Continue to sweat vegetables until they give up much of their moisture and begin to brown and caramelize slightly.
  6. Add garlic and sauté until fragrant, 30 seconds
  7. Add umami bomb (mixture of tomato paste, soy sauce and anchovy paste) and stir to incorporate, another 30 seconds
  8. Add about 1/3 of the bottle of red wine to finish deglazing the pan and stop the browning process.  Reduce heat to low and simmer stirring occasionally and scraping up any remaining fond.  Once all the fond is incorporated, off the heat entirely to prevent it from reducing too much.
  9. Meanwhile, while wine and vegetables are simmering, cube beef into 2-2.5 inch cubes (they’re going to shrink a lot when they cook in the oven) and add to a dutch oven or braising pot.  Sprinkle the beef with flour and stir to ensure the beef is evenly coated.  Place uncovered, in 400°F oven for 5 minutes.  Remove from oven, stir, and return to the oven uncovered for another 5 minutes.
  10. Remove beef from oven.  Add contents of sauté pan, bacon, remaining wine, 1/2 can of beef broth and bouquet garni to the beef in the dutch oven.  Stir to make sure everything is well incorporated.
  11. Cover, and bring to a boil.
  12. Once boiling, off the heat on the stove and place dutch oven into the oven and mostly cover with a lid, leaving the lid slightly ajar with a 1/2 or so inch gap.  Reduce oven temperature to 325°F.
  13. Allow stew to braise for 3-4 hours in the oven until beef is very tender.  You shouldn’t need to babysit it too much.
  14. Approximately 1 hour before finishing, prepare potatoes and onions:
    1. Place potatoes in a large pot and fill with water so water is covering potatoes by 2 inches.  Cover, and bring to a boil.  Add a large pinch of Kosher salt and then uncover and reduce to a simmer.  Simmer potatoes until they are soft and pierce easily with a fork, approximately 45 minutes.
    2. Meanwhile, add 2 tablespoons oil to a 10 inch skillet and sauté onions over medium high heat until lightly browned, 3-5 minutes.  Add remaining beef stock to skillet and deglaze any onion fond that may have formed.  Reduce heat to low and simmer for 45 minutes.  Cover or partially cover if stock reduces too quickly (ultimately, you want all but a couple tablespoons of stock to reduce)
  15. 15 minutes before finishing, transfer onions and whatever liquid remains in the skillet to the dutch oven; replace in oven as it was before.
  16. Clean the skillet, if need be, and prepare the mushrooms:  Melt 2 tablespoons unsalted butter over medium heat.  Once foaming has subsided, add mushrooms and season with salt and pepper.  Sauté mushrooms.  You will observe that at first, the fat is absorbed into the mushrooms and the pan will look quite dry.  Once the fat begins to come back out of the mushrooms and the mushrooms look slightly wet, add the shot of brandy and flambé.
  17. Remove the dutch oven from the oven and add the mushrooms.  Replace the lid and leave a 1/4 inch gap.  Using sturdy oven mitts or thick potholders, firmly grasp the dutch oven and dump the liquid out of the dutch oven, using the lid to catch any large pieces, through a fine mesh strainer (to catch the smaller pieces) and into a 4 quart saucepan.  Cover the dutch oven and set aside.
  18. Simmer the liquid in the saucepan until reduced by 1/3 to 1/2, skimming off the fat as it rises to the top
  19. Meanwhile, drain the potatoes.  Add 1 stick of unsalted butter to the potatoes along with 1/4 cup of parsley and toss until butter is melted.
  20. Return reduced liquid from saucepan to dutch oven and stir to reincorporate.
  21. Serve stew over potatoes

Deep Dive: 50 Kitchen Essentials Every Cook Should Have

This post was last updated on October 21, 2024

Epic Post Alert:  This is a tad long but I’m writing it because likely the #1 question I get from budding culinary aficionados is “What do I absolutely have to have in my kitchen to get started?” 

Well, here it is – The List.

Continue reading “Deep Dive: 50 Kitchen Essentials Every Cook Should Have” →

Vegan Mushroom Bisque

Photo Credit: Lucas Scott Wright

I’ve been trying to make one vegan/vegetarian dish each week to cut down a bit on my meat consumption.  The secret ingredient to this dish is homemade cashew cream which, in the finished product, you wouldn’t know isn’t dairy.  You could make this recipe using heavy cream rather than the cashew cream for a vegetarian version, but I highly recommend using the cashew cream because its light nuttiness truly compliments the gentle earthy flavor of the mushrooms.

Time:  1 hour
Difficulty:  Easy/Intermediate
Cost:  $5.00/plate
Serves: 4

Ingredients:

  1.  Vegetable oil, for frying mushrooms, approximately 3-4 tablespoons
  2. 3/4 lb crimini mushrooms, chopped
  3. 1/2 lb shiitake mushrooms, chopped, stems discarded
  4. Salt and pepper
  5. 4 small shallots, finely minced
  6. 3 cloves garlic, finely minced
  7. 1/2 cup sherry wine, plus 1/2 teaspoon
  8. 4 cups vegetable broth (32oz box)
  9. Chopped chives (for garnish)
  10. 1/4 cup brandy
  11. White truffle oil or olive oil (for garnish)
  12. 8oz can raw cashews (i.e., unsalted and not roasted)
  13. Approximately 1 cup cold water

Instructions:

Note:  The reason we’re doing the mushrooms in batches here is because each batch serves a different purpose.  The first batch (step 2) will create and nice mushroom fond in which to sauté our aromatics (the shallot and garlic). The second batch (step 5) will absorb the flavor of the aromatics.  The third batch (step 8) will add a chunky texture and earthy flavor to the bisque.

  1. Begin by making the cashew cream.  Dump the entire 8oz can of cashews into a blender and pulse a few times to finely chop.  Add half the water and pulse a few more times.  With the motor running, add the rest of the water and blend until a thick, smooth cream begins to form.  This took about 5 minutes with my Ninja blender.  You will need to stop a few times to scrape down the sides of the blender with a spatula.  Add a bit of water, a couple of tablespoons at a time, if creamy texture isn’t achieved after 5-7 minutes of blending.  It should have the texture and consistency of créme fraîche .  Once cream is finished, set aside in a bowl and cover; allow to rest at room temperature.
  2. Chop all mushrooms and combine into a large bowl.
  3. Heat 2 tablespoons vegetable oil over medium-high heat in a sauté pan or large frying pan.  Once pan is quite hot, add 1/3 of the mushrooms.  Sauté until most of their water is given up and they release a slightly nutty aroma, approximately 5 minutes.  Remove with a slotted spoon and transfer to an appropriate pot for making soup (a small stock pot or large 4-6 quart sauce pan would be appropriate).
  4. Add shallots and sauté until translucent, 5-7 minutes.  Add a bit of vegetable oil and lower the heat if they start to brown.
  5. Add garlic and sauté with shallots until very fragrant, 1-2 more minutes
  6. Add second third of mushrooms and sauté with shallots and garlic until pan is looking somewhat dry, 3 -4 minutes
  7. Add sherry wine to deglaze the pan.  Flambé if you like.  Bring to a boil and allow any remaining raw alcohol to cook off, 3 minutes.  The aroma will change from pungent and sharp to gentle and sweet.  Transfer contents of pan to pot with first batch of mushrooms.
  8. Add vegetable stock to pot and bring to a boil.
  9. Add the last 1/3 of mushrooms to the sauté pan along with a little oil if there isn’t enough oil left in the pan.  Sauté for 2 minutes over high heat.  Add 1/4 cup brandy and Flambé.  Reduce until liquid in the pan is evaporated and off the heat.
  10.  Off the heat on the pot and using an immersion blender, pureé the contents until very smooth.  Return to a simmer and stir in cashew cream, a few spoonfuls at a time, until desired color and texture is achieved.  Season to taste with salt and pepper (Note:  You’re probably going to need a lot of salt since none of the ingredients have any natural saltiness to them).
  11. Once seasoned to taste, stir in flambéed mushrooms.  Bring to a simmer and then off the heat
  12. Stir in 1/2 teaspoon raw sherry wine to brighten the sauce and add acidity
  13. Serve with a garnish of chives and truffle or olive oil.