Curds and Ways

Bless me, I broke the soup! Positively curdled it. How does one accomplish such a sorry state of affairs, wreck the steaming restorative, as it were? Get me a cookie to ease the pain.

When making soup on a chilly day, you need only a dairy ingredient and high heat to find out how curdling - or "breaking" - happens. Any soup that contains an egg, milk, cream or buttermilk will curdle if heated too high.

I broke a good soup just this very week. Wunderculinarian Jeanne Ambrose and her daughter, Lindsey, have a fabulous cookbook called Heartbreak Recovery Kitchen, in which they defend the right of everyone to throw a pity party now and then, in good taste, of course. If you jump into the book as I did, you'll find a recipe for Ale-Cheddar Soup With Bacon Croutons, and what could be warmer on a blustery day?

The soup called for half-and-half or milk - and for that reason, I should have held my thermometer or at least my elbow at the ready. When proteins are heated, they may coagulate to the degree that they separate from the liquid, causing that "pieces floating in a pond" look that makes a soup appear broken, or curdled. Heated eggs are particularly known for their curdling ability.

If you have a starch in the mixture, such as flour or cornstarch, that will raise the temperature at which protein coagulation happens, but you have to be careful, just the same. If a recipe calls for "simmering," many chefs agree that the temperature should not exceed 180 degrees, or well below the boiling point. If you boil the soup, you'll be sorry.

Mind the soup and keep watch. Simmer with the gentle spirit of a potions master. The soup is flavorful and aromatic, so handle with care.

Foundations II - The Beginning

We are three weeks into the Foundations II class, which is back to the culinary side of cooking and frankly, I've had to pound some French bread dough this morning just to get a break from studying how acids and alkalis affect red cabbage. Culinary. You devil.

The first practical exam, I drew hollandaise and a veloute sauce. I sailed through the hollandaise without breaking it and quietly declared it brilliant, best ever. Well done. The chef was not of the same mind. He found it too salty, too lemony and too thick. (Just the way we like at it home.) You see how humbling a culinary practical exam is? Got whipped on that one. And then, the veloute.

I cooked it for an hour, well beyond the minimum 30 minutes, but the chef found it "too starchy." Mein hair, how can it be? Overall score: 89. I'll take it. I was happy in fact, because I'd finished on time, nothing broke, and nothing slid to the floor. Nothing caught on fire, and I got a perfect score on station cleanliness (this is harder than it sounds).

On Practical No. 2, my paper slip said "consomme and potato soup." Uh-oh. I had practiced every soup in our packet - except the potato, and we had not had time in class to do  it. Confident that I could get through the consomme with love, love, love as I'd given it in my own kitchen, I swanned through it with an excellent result and a respectable 9.5 of 10 on the knife cuts (braise heaven) and a 9 of 10 on seasoning. It didn't break, and chef said it was the "clearest soup" he had seen that day. Brava. How hard could simple-minded potato soup be, I'd already done the hard one.

With no clarification to bilge up, I raised my knife. The devil is in those knife cuts, those medium size perfect squares you need to cut those potatoes into. It had been 9 weeks since I had done knife cuts, and they just weren't falling for me. I used too much time trying to get perfect squares, instead of applying that time to reducing the soup. With time running out, like you see on TV, I threw everything into the sauce pot - this is so infantile. Why didn't I just pour a little milk and cream, and use my eyes? Would I do such a thing to bread dough? Of course not.

The soup took a beating like you wouldn't believe - a 5 out of a possible 15, and all on the consistency mark; the flavor was fine. YeastGods. Final result for both: An 81, OK for a mechanical bull-riding score but not so good for a practical exam. I left class a little more glum that day, my commis hat a little slumped on my face. I know I've had a tough day when my cravat breaks free of its pristine knot.

And so for a photo above, you get a lovely image of tourned carrots, one of them cut bv the chef to check the degree of doneness. It's the only plate I've had a chance to take a shot of with my cell phone, because Foundations II is all about hustling and hurtling from station to stove. Learning on the fly. Salting wounds. Listening with our tongues.

Shaking things off at the nearest Buck.

Soup's On

Jeanne's, what's on your stove today?

It's a wintry day in Dallas and for this, I like a hearty soup and loaves of fresh bread that can fill the air with warm aromas, promoting the senses that all is well. If you're facing high winds (as I know they are in Tennessee, according to the warnings for the Smoky Mountains region), a cold drizzling rain without the hint of snow or even a certain mistful feeling due to waning twilight, get out your big knife and get into a good roasted red pepper and eggplant soup. The one featured in Bon Appetit takes time and effort, but the results are a spoonful of something wonderful.

This soup is thick, it's loaded with veggies, it makes a goodly large batch to freeze or share with friends. It is a very charming soup - but do allow enough time to work your way through it. You'll be chopping eggplants, red bell peppers, leeks, onions, garlic and fresh herbs, but you'll feel thankful in the end.

There was real flour power in the Singing Wheat Kitchen today - I took dough from the Pain a l'Ancienne recipe featured in the "Bread Baker's Apprentice" book, made two baguettes and knocked back two balls of dough for the freezer (for future pizza dough) and set two more balls in the fridge to make foccacia tomorrow. What a wonderful, versatile bread dough for dividing and conquering. The baguettes turned out very rustic-looking but tasted marvelous, like French bread. They would be even more terrific if loaded with pepper and proscuitto. I must try this.

The bread recipe recommends using a plastic dough scraper, so I hauled my boots over to Sur La Table and nearly swooned with all the goodies they've got on their shelves for the holidays. If you're looking for Christmas ornaments shaped like wheels of cheese, an espresso machine or peas in a pod, this is the place. I had to force myself to focus on the scraper and look straight ahead, neither to the left or right. Have you seen the colors they're doing on immersion blenders these days?

You can work in a quick trip like that if you're allowing the dough to rise, but don't overdue it. Don't get lost in a Whole Foods aisle on the way home, browsing the chocolate like it's research.

Get back home and get the chopping done for the soup. Once those flavors are in the pot and filling the air, you can butter up your bread knowing that the soup's on, the day is done and good things will happen.

(Photo: Loafing around at Home Slice Bakery in Dubois, Wyoming. By John H. Ostdick)