Alton Brown's Cheese Soup

Alton Brown's Cheese Soup

 

I watch Alton Brown's show, Good Eats, on Hulu, and not long ago, they showed his second show on Cheese.  After spending two years in France as a young man, I have a great love of all things cheese, so I was particularly interested to see what Alton would do with the subject.

I came away from the show with two recipes, one for a cheese spread made from leftover bits of cheese, which is a funny idea in my house, where cheese disappears at light speed, and the cheese soup that I have linked to above.  I was at the grocery store thinking about dinner when I decided that I would try Alton's Cheese Soup.

I keep recipes in OneNote on SkyDrive.  I can highly recommend this to anyone.  It allows me to call up a recipe on my phone.  Of course, it helps that I have Windows Phone 7, and Windows Live is integrated into the OS.  I can input recipes on any computer with an internet connection, and then call it up on my phone.  Evernote would probably do the same thing.

Now, if you will take a moment to look at the recipe, you will see that it starts with a pretty standard mirepoix (celery, carrots, onions).  Normally I am not a fan of mirepoix.  I am not a big fan of onions (hence the title of this blog) and I really hate cooked celery.  This recipe caught my eye because you puree the vegetables after cooking.  I figured I might be able to handle the mirepoix if they were reduced to an almost unrecognizable mash before I ate it.  That "almost" will turn out to be quite important.

The recipe is pretty simple.  Sweat the vegetables, toss in a little flour, add chicken broth and simmer for half an hour.  One suggestion is to do your mise en place, at least for everything used in this first stage of the recipe.  After starting the simmer, you have 30 minutes to grate your cheese, and get your cream and finishing elements ready, but you need everything else ready when you start, so that you can watch your vegetables sweat.

I made only one major change to the recipe.  I used 8 oz. of Tillamook Smoked Cheddar, and a bit extra of HEB Artisan Cheddar.  One other thing of note.  I used HEB Garlic Chicken Broth, in a carton.  It was 32 oz. by weight, which turned out to be just a little short of the quart mentioned in the recipe.  My soup didn't notice the difference.

Everything worked out just the way Alton said it would.  I took it off the heat, removed the bay leaf, added the cream and blitzed it with my stick blender.  I wasn't sure that I got it as blitzed as I wanted, and to be honest, I didn't.  I am not sure that I could have any better with any other sort of blender, but what I do know, is that the vegetables ended up in very small bits, too small to need chewing.  Unfortunately, the fibrous celery left behind a few long strands which were less than ideal.

But, the cheese melted easily, just from the residual heat from the simmering, and I ended up with a tasty cheese soup.  After tasting, I added a little more salt, and a little more Worcestershire Sauce.  As mentioned in the recipe, I did need to reheat it a little after that to bring it back to hot.

I liked it, but I ladled myself up a rather large bowl, and didn't completely finish it.  By the end I found the onion to be a little overpowering.  Onions do that to me.  They seem to build up as I eat something with a lot of onion flavor in it.

This recipe makes a lot of soup, and being a cream soup, you shouldn't leave it out too long.  Get it into the refrigerator as soon as it cools.

Update:  Night One, I did not finish the bowl of soup that I started.  It was good, but my opinion didn't last until the end of the bowl.  I tried more the next day, reheated in a microwave, and didn't really care for it.  When I got home, I tried reheating it in a pan.  I find this hard to say, but I couldn't take more than a bite or two.

By the second night, it tasted more like a vegetable soup with some cheese in it, and I ended up throwing out about a third of it, because no one in the house wanted to eat it.  Maybe the type of cheese made the difference, but as a recipe for a cheddar cheese soup, I have to mark this one as a failure.