RSS

Tag Archives: truffle oil

White Bean Soup with Truffle

29 May

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I wasn’t planning on making this soup for a while, but someone posted a question about it on one of my favourite Thermomix Forums the other day – they had used tinned cannellini beans rather than dry beans, and the recipe was a flop – even though the recipe book says you can use them. So I said I’d make it with the real thing and see what it was like – and then go about working out how to do it more successfully with tinned cannellini beans.

What’s the forum, you ask?  It’s http://www.forumthermomix.com

It has an abundance of recipes, tips, tweaks and general thermomix chat.  I’m a bit addicted.  So if you don’t know about it – get on it!

The recipe is from Guy Grossi.  He’s one of my favourite Melbourne Chefs – for many years I was a Friday regular in the cheap seats at the Grossi Florentino Cellar Bar with a group of my work colleagues.  His food always reminds me of good friends, laughter and hilarious war stories.

Anyway, back to the soup.  This is as simple as it gets to make.  Oil, garlic, onion, beans, fontina cheese and truffle.  You can substitute truffle oil for truffle if you don’t have any – and let’s face it, I bet there’s not that many of us that have truffle sitting around waiting to be used!! So, I used truffle oil, which I always have in my cupboard – I often add some of it to the mushroom risotto, as well as some rehydrated porcini mushrooms.  Yum!  I use the Simon Johnson brand, but I am sure there are many others out there.

Once you’ve added the beans to the thermomix bowl, it can be a little noisy.  The noise dies down after a few minutes once the beans start to soften in the stock.  I used water and homemade vegetable stock concentrate – (mainly because I want to use my batch of chicken stock to serve as a consommé with the dumplings when I make them again.  I’m going to use Heston Blumenthal’s stock clarifying method and see how it works) – and it had a lovely mellow flavour – surprisingly truffley considering the relatively small amount of truffle oil in the recipe.

This makes a really rich soup – I poured it into three bowls as we had a friend pop over at lunch time, but it would easily have done five serves – it really is quite satisfying.  I served it with bread, which frankly, I didn’t need to eat – but it was Phillippa’s bread, and it was fresh!!

This soup forms a skin fairly quickly – so it’s really a soup that you’d want to make and serve immediately, otherwise you’d need to return to the thermomix, heat and blitz for a while to get rid of any chunky bits.

 
4 Comments

Posted by on May 29, 2012 in Entrees

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Crab and Prawn Polenta

03 Apr

What a great, quick, impressive dish!  It takes no time to put together, and would be lovely served with a small side salad.  It’s quite rich, so the amount you make would easily be a main course for 4 people – even more if you served a starter.

I had my parents over for dinner the other night – and I didn’t want anything too fussy to serve them.  I was on my own – with a toddler, which meant feeding, bathing, pyjama-ing, and putting to bed as well as getting a half decent meal on the table.  This recipe looked as easy as pie – and really, it is – so simple, so quick, and really, really delicious.

I was a bit lazy and bought the crab meat already shelled and picked.  In an ideal world, I would have liked to have cooked the crab myself, but I just didn’t have time that day. I’ve never cooked crabs or lobster, and I’m going to have to remedy that – soon!

Believe it or not, I had to search high and low for the quick cook polenta.  I couldn’t find it ANYWHERE!  I had some slow cooking polenta in the cupboard, but the quick cook stuff was somewhat elusive.  I ended up getting it at Leo’s Supermarket, even though Woolworths said they stocked it – I couldn’t find it anywhere, and I couldn’t find anyone to help me look for it.  What’s more, they put the slow cooking polenta and the quick cooking polenta in completely different areas of the supermarket, as I discovered when I actually found the quick cook stuff at Woolworths today on my weekly shopping venture.

Anyway, the crab and the prawns were easy to get.  The other challenge ingredient was chervil.  I’ve never cooked with chervil before and couldn’t find anywhere that stocked it – even dried :-(. So while I was at my third greengrocer, I googled it and found a site that recommended using 1 teaspoon of dried parsley flakes, plus one eighth of a teaspoon of rubbed, dried sage.  So that I did. I’m not sure exactly what chervil is supposed to taste like, but the parsley and sage tasted pretty good to us.

I used the Simon Johnson truffle oil, which was lovely.  I also use that for some of my mushroom risottos, one of the Thermomix staples!  It really lifts the dish from good to great.

The polenta is lovely and soupy and is very rich and satisfying.  I loved it, but couldn’t contemplate seconds.  What I did not use, I put into tupperware and had for my dinner the next night, reheated in a steam microwave with the lid on the tupperware.  

My tips for this recipe:

Even if the crab meat says it’s picked and cleaned, do have a look through and give it a bit of a rinse.  I discovered a few gritty bits in mine.

The recipe also calls for the prawns to be cut into 2 or 3 pieces.  Next time, I’d actually leave them whole (deheaded, tailed and de-veined) as the prawns I bought were on the small side.  If you are using King Prawns, you could cut them into two or three, but small prawns cut into two were too small for me, and I like seeing chunks of prawn rather than tiny little bits.

Always use great parmesan and grate it yourself!

Approximate cost of non pantry ingredients for this recipe was:

Ocean Blue Brand Crab Claw – 140g x 2 – total $15.98

Prawns: $5.00

Creme Fraiche: $5.48

 
1 Comment

Posted by on April 3, 2012 in Entrees, Main meals

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,