Provence & the Midi · Soup
Soupe de Poissons de Roche
- Advanced
- 55 min
- roughly 4 of 4 for cost
Leads with a floral thread lifting the aroma, aromatics blooming from the first bite, with warmth in the tail.
Ingredients
- 2 kg small rock fish (rascasse, weever, small wrasse, gurnard, a green crab or two), gutted
- 150 ml fruity olive oil
- 2 onions, sliced
- 1 fennel bulb, sliced, plus 1 tsp fennel seed
- 6 garlic cloves, crushed
- 800 g very ripe tomatoes, chopped
- 2 wide strips dried orange peel, white pith scraped away
- 1 g saffron threads
- 2 litres water
- 1 tsp fine sea salt, plus more to finish
- For the rouille: 4 garlic cloves
- 1 waxy potato (150 g), boiled soft in the soup and lifted out
- 1 egg yolk at room temperature
- 1 small hot dried red chilli, soaked and skinned
- 200 ml olive oil for the rouille
- A pinch of saffron for the rouille
- 1 thin baguette, sliced and dried out in the oven
The skills inside
Sweating aromatics: soft, never brownedThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilMashing & puréeing
The words inside
Crab Seasons Around the WorldFennel Bulb
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · egg · fish · shellfish
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
- Sweat the onions, fennel and garlic in the olive oil over low heat until translucent and quite without colour, then add the fennel seed and wait until the pan smells of aniseed.
- Raise the heat, turn the whole fish in the hot oil until the flesh whitens and begins to fall off the frames, then add tomatoes, orange peel and saffron and stir until the tomatoes slump.
- Pour on the water, bring it to a bare shiver and hold it there for 30 minutes; the surface should tremble, never roll. 30 min
- Pass everything, bones and all, through the coarse plate of a food mill, pressing until only dry pulp remains, then push that liquid through a conical sieve and salt it harder than feels polite.
- For the rouille, pound the garlic and chilli to a smooth paste with salt, work in the boiled potato and saffron, then the yolk, then dribble in the oil until it stands up around the pestle.
- Reheat the soup to just under a boil and serve it with the dried bread, letting each person melt rouille off a croûton into the bowl.
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.
Mashing & puréeing 114 recipes
- Smooth to the degree the dish asks for, judged on the tongue rather than by eye: no lumps, no fibres, no grit, unless texture is the point.
- No gluey elasticity: a spoonful drops cleanly off the spoon rather than stretching in a rope behind it.
- The consistency holds: it mounds on a spoon and stays there, neither slumping flat nor standing so stiff that a spoon has to cut it.
- Nothing separates on the plate: no water or fat weeping out into a ring within a minute of serving.
- The colour is even throughout, with no streaks of unincorporated fat, liquid, or seasoning at the edges of the bowl.
Where it goes wrong A starchy ingredient met a high-speed blade, so the cells burst and released their starch: what should be light comes out as an elastic glue that lifts off the spoon in one mass.
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes
- The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
- It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
- The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
- Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
- The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.
Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Albariño
- Also Right
- Champagne
- From the Taps
- Pilsner or witbier
- Zero-Proof
- White grape & tonic
Shellfish sweetness meets acid, salinity, and bubbles, precision instruments for delicate meat.
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