Tag Archives: vegetable stocl

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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.