Sea Food - chowder à la mode du Man in Greasy Shirt
The chowder recipes posted on NotDelia.com persuaded me to have a go myself. I can buy a wide range of good commercial fish soups here in France, but fresh seafood is more exciting, and I had some time to play.
My local hypermarket has a good seafood counter, although we’re 200Km from the sea, so I asked the woman running it to give me some ingredients for a soup for two people. By my reckoning, she overdid it a bit, but we both agreed that variety was an essential part of the recipe. Here”s what I ended up with, each in about 100gm portions:
- dorade (sea bream)
- farmed salmon (much cheaper than any of the wild fish)
- large tentacle (squid?)
- small mussels
- cooked prawnss (the only uncooked ones were too tiny)
- scallops
I also picked up some smoked haddock from the prepacked food shelf.
The rest came from my kitchen and garden:
- red-skinned potatoes
- butter
- garlic
- fresh herb (thyme?)
- sea salt
- fancy pepper corns with pink & red bits
- crème fraîche
I ended up with some ingredients left over - all the smoked haddock and mussels, and some of the fish and prawns, but this was intentional. I added a few each time I recooked the soup, so that it always had a fresh-tasting ingredient or two over a background of gradually merging older ingredients. That’s the way I do stock pots, and even commercial soups - even if it’s only to add a few slices of crisp vegetables.
So how did it taste? Juicy. To my surprise, the tentacle was not tough and rubbery in spite of its size. I’ve had some pretty tough, tasteless squid in my day, but this was a delight. First time round, the liquid of the soup was thinner than any chowder I’ve had in restaurants - but I could probably change that by mixing in a more floury potato that would break down and spread itself around.
By the third re-cooking (with the mussels and the rest of the prawns & scallops now in the pot), it was becoming more of a mature soup. Today, I’ll add some smoked haddock, but not too much because it’s salty.
For a style that is distinctly amateur and untidy compared with NotDelia, take a look at Man in Greasy Shirt (actually, a fleece pullover - it’s winter here):
Now go away and do a better job yourself.
