Massachusetts · Soup
Boston Clam Chowder
- Intermediate
- 60 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with a briny, maritime salinity, richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 3kg quahogs or 900g chopped clams with their juice
- 150g salt pork, diced small
- 2 onions, diced
- 700g floury potatoes, in 2cm cubes
- 500ml clam juice
- 500ml whole milk
- 250ml heavy cream
- 2 tbsp butter
- 1 bay leaf
- Black pepper and thyme
- Oyster crackers to serve
The skills inside
Sweating aromatics: soft, never brownedRendering fat: and cooking in what runs outSteaming: basket, leaf and lidThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilStraining & passing through a sieveKeeping the cooking liquidKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · shellfish · molluscs
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- If using whole quahogs, steam them open in a little water, chop the meat, and strain the liquor through cloth.
- Render the salt pork slowly until crisp; lift out the cracklings and reserve.
- Sweat the onions in the fat until translucent, then add the potatoes, clam juice, and bay. Simmer 15 min until the potatoes are tender and starting to break at the edges. 15 min
- Add the milk and cream and heat until steaming, never boil. Add the clams and cook 2 min only. 2 min
- Season with pepper and thyme, finish with butter, and rest off the heat 30 min before rewarming to serve, topped with cracklings. 30 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Albariño or Muscadet
- Also Right
- Assyrtiko or Vermentino
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with lemon
The Atlantic’s whites beside the sea’s own liquor: salinity in sympathy, acid keeping everything bright.
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