Sunday, November 8, 2009

Ten-thousand Golden Dragons of Happiness Mushroom Soup


Hello again, and Welcome. Today, I'd like to share one of my favorite recipes with you. This is a very festive soup, especially wonderful in the Winter, with accents of flavor and color, like tomato, orange peel, saffron, and wakame, blending together to create a magical cross pollination of a classic bouillabaise with the old Chinese restaurant favorite; hot and sour soup.

Like so many vegetarians who came of age eating meat, I retain happy memories of favorite dishes dating back to my pre-vegetarian days. Bouillabaise is way up on the list of these, and inspired me to create a vegetarian version with a rich, pungent broth, and lots of wonderful mushrooms, instead of fish, swimming beneath a surface that shimmers richly with red-gold oil.

Naming the Soup:


Illustration by Asakiyume (aka Inatangle)

When I lived in San Francisco in the late seventies and early eighties, I always got a kick out of the frequent appearance of the number 10,000 in local Chinese culture, whether it was a philosophical reference to a state of mind enabling one to contemplate ten-thousand mountaintops all at once, or the cozy little used bookstore in the Sunset district, called Ten-Thousand Paperbacks. At a basic level, the term implies a "whole lot" of somethings in one, like the many things that combine to create this tasty melange, and I threw in the golden dragons for good measure, because dragons are after all, auspicious, and because of the wonderful red-gold broth. So this soup could also be called, "A Whole Lot of Golden Auspiciousness in One Pot."

Please try a large bowl alongside a crisp green salad, and with a huge slice of warm, crusty French bread, spread generously with sweet cream butter. A glass of cold white wine wouldn't hurt!


Ingredients:

Half a dozen leeks, white portions sliced very thin and then sliced once across the center to produce concentric half circles

One large yellow onion, chopped fine

Half a head of garlic, minced

Handful of parsley, chopped fine

Grated rind of one orange (orange part)

Generous teaspoonful of saffron

Two fresh bay leaves

Large spoonful tomato paste

Extra virgin olive oil

1/4 cup Shao Xing wine, or dry sherry

Approximately five pounds of mushrooms, washed and relatively thick-sliced*

Half a dozen large, ripe tomatoes. peeled, seeded, and rough chopped

Handful of wakame

(A couple of serrano peppers diced fine if you'd like a little bite)

Salt, and course ground black pepper to taste

One pound firm tofu, rinsed and diced into 1/2 inch cubes

*Note on selection of mushrooms: I read once that Bouillabaise, a fisherman's stew, is traditionally something into which just about anything that found its way into the net was put. In this same spirit, I like to add a wide variety of mushrooms to this soup. Certainly the standard white ones, and the brown crimini mushrooms that have recently become so common in our supermarkets are great, but if you can add some shiitake mushrooms, or some of the little white enoki, a can of straw mushrooms (rinsed and soaked in lightly salted water for half an hour or so to remove the tinned flavor), that would be wonderful. I once added a few wild chantrelle that I found in a specialty shop. Dried mushrooms are also fine if washed well and reconstituted. Be careful of the dry shiitake though. Their broth, after reconstitution, should be used with caution if you choose to add it to the soup as it can be powerfully earthy in both flavor and aroma and can overpower other, more delicate ingredients.


Preparation

Put rinsed and diced tofu in a bowl of water, and set aside.

Place handful of wakame (a variety of dried seaweed availiable at oriental food markets) in a dish of warm water. Set aside.

In a small skillet, dry roast the saffron over medium high heat until it turns a shade darker, being careful not to burn it. Now stir this toasted saffron into a small dish into which you have already poured 1/4 cup hot water. Set aside.

Using the same small skillet again, heat 2 tablespoons olive oil over medium high heat until fragrant. Add the large spoonful of tomato paste to this and stir over heat until tomato paste deepens in color to a darker, reddish brown. Set aside.

Heat 3/4 cup olive oil in a large pot over medium high heat until fragrant. Add garlic, leeks and onion, and stir until mixture turns a pale gold color. (If you are adding serrano peppers, you may add these now and cook mixture for a couple more minutes.)

Stir in tomato paste until fully integrated. Now add your mushrooms, holding back the straw mushrooms and enoki mushrooms if you have chosen to use these, as they are quite delicate and should be added at the end with the tofu.

Next throw in your chopped tomatoes, parsley, orange rind, bay leaves, two teaspoons of salt, and the 1/4 cup shao xing wine.

Raise heat to high. Cook, stirring occasionally, for ten minutes, or so, or until the mushrooms go limp. If mixture begins to stick, add a little more wine to deglaze.

Now add the saffron in its water, and after draining the water from the wakame, add the reconstituted wakame, as well.

Pour in enough water to cover your ingredients. The more water you add, the more soup-like, the less water, the more stew-like.

Bring the soup to a low boil while seasoning to taste with salt and course ground pepper. Once soup has come to a boil, remove from heat.

Finally, drain the diced tofu, stir gently into the soup, along with any of the more delicate mushrooms. Allow flavors to blend for a half an hour, or so, then heat through again, but not to a boil, and serve.

This soup is particularly tasty the next day.

Many thanks to Asakiyume, who drew the great illustration some time ago when she learned about this soup. I really love it, and it would be great if more readers of this blog sent ideas, drawings, poems, etc.

Best Wishes, Scratch

3 comments:

  1. I can't wait to try this!! Thanks so much for posting it! And I'm really happy you like the picture :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Made it!! It turned out great! Family loved it--even the daughter who doesn't like mushrooms liked the broth.

    I had to forego saffron, and I used a mixture of canola oil and peanut oil for the cup of oil instead of olive oil, but otherwise I was pretty faithful to the recipe. I used a zester to get long strands of orange rind, instead of just grating it the way I normally do, and that was fun.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great! I'm very pleased you it worked out for you. I would say check out my Mushroom Goulash Poblano on a more recent post, but if your daughter doesn't like mushrooms, we might be talking mushroom overload. Regards

    ReplyDelete