A quick, simple but very satisfying soup, this.

Surprisingly there are very few recipes for mushroom and stilton soups available online, and most of the ones there are seem… wrong. This one borrowed a few basic ideas from Phil Vickery’s recipe, but dispenses with the “wild mushroom” crap.

I’ve no idea why food writers and celebrity chefs the world over will only touch a mushroom if it’s some fancy-schmancy “wild” variety. Bog standard closed-cap mushrooms aren’t highly exciting, it’s true, but they have a wonderful subtly complex flavour and, to my mind, actually work better in a soup like this where the stronger flavours of mushrooms like shitake can end up fighting with each other, and with the other principal ingredients.

The Boring Bits

• Serves 2-3
• Preparation time: 5-10 minutes
• Cooking time: approx. 10 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 pint (570ml) vegetable stock
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 small onion
• 4oz (110g) stilton cheese
• 7oz mushrooms (200g)
• a large dollop of sour cream
• 1 tbsp thyme
• black pepper

Throwing it all together

First, prepare your vegetables. Dice the onion, slice the mushrooms and peel then roughly chop the garlic cloves. Stilton isn’t a vegetable unless you count the blue bits, but dice it nonetheless.

Add the onion and garlic to the stock in a medium saucepan, and bring to the boil.

Once it’s boiling stir in the stilton until it begins to melt. Simmer gently for about a minute, stirring until the cheese has blended into the stock.

Now add the mushrooms, and season with black pepper. Leave at a simmer for another 6 minutes or so, stirring in the thyme when you have about a minute left to go.

Remove the soup from the heat and stir in the sour cream (feel free to provide your own idea of how much a “dollop” is).

At this point, you have a choice which provides you with two very different soups. It’s possible to serve this as-is, allowing you to savour the whole chunks of mushroom. But you can create a very different soup by sticking the whole lot in a blender (probably on the “liquefy” setting) and reducing it to a thicker, more uniform whole.

I personally prefer the colour and texture of the blended version, but the choice is yours.

Serve with whole-grain bread, and opine loudly about how any “wild” mushrooms you’re likely to buy in the shops are probably grown in the same sheds as the simple, versatile ones you’re enjoying right now.

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 8:21 pm .
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