Fine-tuning someone else’s recipe

One of my favorite cookbook authors is James Peterson.  The first book of his I purchased was Cooking, a book pretty accurately subtitled as a culinary education.  I’ve since bought his book on soups and another on sauces and they are both great. Peterson has a long history as an educator (17 years on the faculty of New York’s French Culinary Institute) and an impressive list of culinary awards and nominations.

Obviously, this guy is a whole lot more talented than I am when it comes to the kitchen.  I probably couldn’t even get admitted as a student at the French Culinary Institute.  This means of course, that if I try a recipe in one of his cookbooks that is a little less than stellar, that it has to be my fault, right? Well, maybe not.

One of the first recipes of Peterson’s I tried was a Thai Hot and Sour Shrimp soup from Cooking.  If you’ve been to a Thai restaurant, it’s a variation of Tom Yum Goong – a soup base of various Thai ingredients with shrimp, mushrooms, and cilantro as garnishes.  When I lived in Boston and there were great Thai restaurants in every neighborhood, this was my standard first course nearly every time I went Thai.  In Philadelphia, there aren’t quite as many Thai restaurants so I really appreciated the opportunity to try and make my own.

My first attempt was OK.  Fortunately, the Whole Foods near me had dried galangal (sort of a variant of ginger), kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, and fish sauce so I could get almost all the ingredients I wanted.  They didn’t have Thai chiles, but jalapeños looked to  be an adequate substitute. I assembled everything and set to work and the results were pretty good but there were some problems.

The flavor was good but could have been a little more intense.  I often find that I like more intense flavors than the ones offered by cookbook authors.  I don’t know if that means that my tastes require/can handle more intensity or cookbook authors turn down the intensity, but I often wind up cranking up the heat and spice level.  You can chalk that up to taste.

The texture was something else. The recipe involves creating a soup base of the chiles, garlic, shallots, galangal, lemongrass, and kaffir lime leaves and while these create a great flavor base, they remain in the soup as bits of stuff that doesn’t have any real flavor anymore but are present as bits in the soup.  I was expecting that the only solids would be the shrimps and the cilantro but these shallot and lemongrass leftovers were present in every spoonful.

In Cooking, Peterson offers a tutorial for Thai soup bases that instructs the cook on how to prepare the various base ingredients. It involves chopping up each ingredient separately, then combining them and chopping them as a group until finely chopped and nearly paste-like.  That helped (actually upping the flavor intensity a little) but the presence of small pieces of solid, chopped galangal was still there and those little pieces of aromatics and flavor ingredients remained a little irritating.

So I tried this recipe a couple more times, adding an extra jalapeño and a little extra fish sauce and I was getting the flavor even closer to where I wanted but those little pieces of shallot, lemongrass and so on kept the soup from perfection.  So I started to improvise. The first step was grinding the ingredients in a mortar and pestle after fine chopping, but that didn’t really do anything.  Step two was to run the soup through a strainer before adding the shrimp and that finally produced a clear soup, but some of the flavor disappeared, which was unfortunate.

So I kept making it according to the instructions (with one additional jalapeño and a little extra fish sauce) and putting up with the little bits of stuff littering the soup but last week I had a burst of inspiration. Instead of running the soup through a strainer, I’d use a food mill.

Food mills (I’ve also heard them referred to as French mills) are often considering a little old fashioned and you don’t see them very often. I swear by mine and use it pretty often. As you can see from the illustration at the left, it’s a round appliance with a circular grinding element suspended over a disk that looks like the side of a box grater made circular.  They usually come with three of these grating disks, from coarse to very fine.  The way these things work is that you put the food in the mill and turn the crank.  The blades at the bottom of the grinder force the food through the grater which is suspended over a bowl that collects the results.  It does pretty much the same thing as a blender, but it does it better even if it does take a little more work.

In this case, a blender would never make a 100% smooth puree of the galangal, jalapeños, and lemongrass but the food mill crushes those little pieces between the grater and blades to squeeze every bit of flavor out of them while keeping the pulp out of the soup.

The results were perfect. After running the soup through my food mill, the soup was a lovely pale green (mostly from the jalapeños) and was as clear and free of solids as you could have wished. Even better, it was full of the strong, assertive flavors of all the jalapeños and all those uniquely Thai ingredients.  Bring the soup back up to a simmer, add the shrimp, mushrooms, and coriander (and whatever else you might want) and the final product was bursting with bright, hot, salty, and sour flavors.

The food mill was an obvious option I should have thought about earlier. As I mentioned, I’ve had Tom Yum Goong dozens of times and I don’t remember little pieces of shallot or jalapeño swimming in my soup. And usually, I’ll opt for shortcuts that save me time and trouble at the expense of presentation but in this case, the texture was getting on my nerves.  I’m not claiming I’m a better cook than Peterson (obviously I’m not) and tinkering with the ingredients is more a matter of taste than anything else.  But I have to say that adding the step of running the finished soup through  food mill makes all the differences in the world.

The recipe below is based on Peterson’s from Cooking (he has a very similar recipe in Splendid Soups) but includes the adjustments I’ve made for it, so if you don’t care for it, blame me, not him.

Recipe

Ingredients

2 tbl vegetable oil (canola, safflower, etc)

3 cloves garlic, minced

2 shallots, minced

5 jalapeño chiles (if you can find Thai chiles, these can be substituted – start with 2 and increase until you get the right heat level)

2-3 pieces dried galangal, soaked in hot water and finely chopped (ginger can be substituted but it will change the flavor a little)

4 kaffir lime leaves, finely chopped

1 stalk lemongrass, tough outer layer discarded and finely chopped

1 tsp sugar

1/3 cup fish sauce

1/4 cup lime juice

6 cups water (or chicken stock)

1 lb shrimp

1/2 lb white button mushrooms, very finely sliced

1/2 cup cilantro, roughly chopped after removing stems

Instructions

Heat the oil in a Dutch oven or stock pot.  Add the garlic and shallots and stir until fragrant but don’t allow the garlic to brown.  Add the chiles, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, and sugar and stir for 2-3 minutes, until shallots and chiles soften.  Add the fish sauce, lime juice, and stock and bring to a simmer.  Simmer gently for 10-15 minutes to bring the flavors together.

Run the soup through a food mill with a medium disk.  Put the soup back in the pot and bring it back to a gentle simmer.  Taste for seasoning, and add sugar, fish sauce, or lime juice in small quantities as required.

Add the shrimp and mushrooms and continue to simmer for 5 minutes or more, until the shrimp is cooked.

Add the cilantro just before serving.

Substitutions and additions

Chicken, mussels, clams, and lobster and all be substituted for or added to the shrimp.  Make sure the chicken is cut into bite size pieces.  I’ve seen this made with green beans instead of mushrooms in restaurants and with julienned carrots or daikon radishes or baby boy choy as additional garnishes.