Wisconsin · Soup
Wisconsin 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
- 450g sharp Wisconsin cheddar, grated
- 1 tbsp Dijon
- 1 tsp Worcestershire
- Cayenne, salt, white pepper
- Popcorn to finish
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Making a rouxSweating aromatics: soft, never brownedThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
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 boil after the cheese goes in.
- Season with mustard, Worcestershire, cayenne, salt, and pepper. Top with popcorn.
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- The raw-flour smell has gone and been replaced by the toasted, biscuity smell of its stage, with nothing acrid behind it.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.
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
- 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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