Kentucky · Soup
Kentucky Beer Cheese Soup
- Easy
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, a warm current of chile, finishing long and savory.
Ingredients
- 55g butter
- 1 onion, diced
- 2 carrots, diced
- 2 celery ribs, diced
- 55g flour
- 500ml vegetable or chicken stock
- 330ml lager
- 500ml milk
- 400g sharp cheddar, grated
- 1 tbsp Dijon mustard
- 1 tsp Worcestershire
- Cayenne, salt, and white pepper
- Popcorn or croutons to finish
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Making a rouxSweating aromatics: soft, never browned
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · fish · celery · mustard · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Reviewed by hand
Method
- Sweat the onion, carrot, and celery in the butter until soft, 10 min. 10 min
- Stir in the flour and cook 2 min to a blond roux. 2 min
- Whisk in the stock and beer and simmer 10 min, then add the milk. 10 min
- Off the heat, add the cheese in handfuls, stirring until each melts before adding more: never let it boil after the cheese goes in.
- Season with mustard, Worcestershire, cayenne, salt, and pepper. Top each bowl with popcorn, the Kentucky touch.
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.
Making a roux 32 recipes
- Taken to the stage the dish named and no further, judged against that colour (pale, blond, or brown to brick), and it got there slowly enough to have coloured evenly.
- It is smooth and mobile: a paste with no dry pockets of flour and no lumps, loosening as it warms rather than sitting stiff in the pan.
- The raw-flour smell has gone and been replaced by the toasted, biscuity smell of its stage, with nothing acrid behind it.
- No black specks anywhere. One scorched fleck condemns the batch; it cannot be stirred back in and it will be tasted in the finished sauce.
- Let down into liquid it goes smooth without lumps and thickens to the body the dish wants, leaving no floury taste on the tongue.
Where it goes wrong The heat was too high and the corners of the pan went unstirred, so it scorched at the edge; black specks run through the finished sauce and carry a bitterness that no amount of seasoning covers.
Sweating aromatics: soft, never browned 198 recipes
- No colour anywhere: tipped under the light the pieces are translucent to pale gold, with no tan edges, no brown tips, and no browned flecks suspended in the fat.
- The pan is quiet: a low steady hiss, not a crackle. A crackle means the moisture has gone and browning has already started.
- The largest piece pressed against the side of the pan collapses without resistance and with no crunch left at its centre.
- The fat is still clear and loose in the pan and the pan floor is clean: nothing caught, nothing browned on to deglaze, because there was never any fond to build.
- It tastes sweet and mild with no raw allium bite at the back of the throat, and none of the roasted sweetness that belongs to the next technique up the heat scale.
Where it goes wrong The heat was too high and nothing covered the pan, so the pieces took colour before they softened; the finished dish carries a roasty sweetness where it wanted a clean one, and the pieces are still firm at the centre under browned edges.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chardonnay (village Burgundy)
- Also Right
- Chenin Blanc
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Verbena iced tea
Chicken is wine’s most agreeable partner. Match the SAUCE, not the bird: cream to oak, tomato to Sangiovese’s acid, herbs to Loire whites.
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