friederike's Reviews
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'le Cordon Bleu' Home Collection: Soups
By Kay Halsey
Merehurst - 1998
A very nice soup, but I‘m not sure it was worth the all the extra steps taken.
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The soup we had was quite nice - but that definitely wouldn't have been the case if I had followed the recipe to the letter.
It started out with me not knowing if '500 g leek (white parts only)' meant '500 g leek, of which you only use the white parts', or '500 g white parts of leek' - it sounds a bit like the latter, but normally, you'd expect the former (I used a potato that weighed approximately 250 g, and then peeled it afterward - because there's so little peel, it hardly matters. That's different with leeks).
I continued following the recipe, until I read the lines 'add the cream to the soup, simmer another 10 min (...) whip the cream and add the grated orange peel'. Wait a minute, was I supposed to add the cream to the soup, or whip it and then add the orange peel? Turns out I had actually missed that the list ingredients called for cream twice - 300 ml (!) to be added to the soup, and another 200 ml to be whipped and used as a decoration/topping. So half a litre cream for four servings!
I ended up adding only 80 ml to the soup, which I thought was plenty (I also added only about 600 ml water instead of the whole litre), and whipping 100 ml cream, which was also fine and could have been slightly less. I also debated whether this last step was worth the effort at all (whip the cream, add flavourings, top each bowl of soup with cream and place under the grill), and it turns out, it wasn't - it didn't do anything at all expect getting the cream slightly burned. Instead, I would perhaps whip the cream, but not place it under the grill.
Also, I used only the grated peel of about a third or half orange - this was a bit too much, in my opinion. We had it as a main dish (for two), which was fine, but I think it's more suitable as a starter (for four).
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