Fine Cooking (June/July 2013)

Chilled soups are a rite of summer. Or at least a rite of summer issues of food magazines. They show up every June, just as predictable as daylilies.  

We're fans. We love the idea of a cold soup as a refreshing way to start a summer meal.

The problem is flavor. Served piping hot, soups are a swirl of heady flavors -- aromas of vegetables, meat and spices rising seductively from the bowl. But cold soups have a, well, chilling effect on flavor. It's just harder to pack flavor into a cold bowl of soup.

Could this Chilled Fennel and Cucumber Soup from Fine Cooking pass the flavor test?

In a word, no. Or at least ours didn't. 

We loved the idea of this -- the cucumber-and-fennel combo sounded so light and refreshing. But we were disappointed with the result.

For one thing, this recipe makes a fairly small amount of actual soup. We halved the recipe, and by the time we ran this through a strainer and added the cream, we had two small portions of soup (the majority of which was cream). 

As a result, the final product essentially taste like cream with the subtlest hint of fennel and cucumber. It was a little like eating spoonfuls of runny tzatziki. 

Is it possible our cukes were less-than-flavorful to begin with? Sure, although we had just purchased them from the farmers market that morning. Is it possible we didn't use enough fennel? Maybe -- our fennel bulbs were somewhat small. Is it possible our mesh strainer was too fine, eliminating too much of the solids? Perhaps. 

But in the end, we're not sure all those tweaks would have mattered all that much. At the end of the day, this is still going to be a soup that's mostly cream with some hints of herbs and cucumber. That's just not our idea of a refreshing summer soup.

This is part of a larger Fine Cooking feature on chilled soups -- maybe we'd have better luck with one of the other recipes. (The Chilled Beet and Beet Green Soup sounds especially good.) But we won't be making this Cucumber and Fennel version again.

Here are some other chilled soups you might like that we enjoyed as well:

• Chilled Sweet Corn Soup
• Chilled Fresh Pea and Buttermilk Soup
• Tomato-Cucumber Gazpacho with Grilled Parmesan Croutons
• Raw Sweet Corn and Cashew Chowder

How about you?  Are you a chilled soup fan?  Any favorite go-to recipes? Please let us know!

 

 

Chilled Fennel and Cucumber Soup
Fine Cooking (June/July 2013), recipe by Shelley Wiseman
Subscribe to Fine Cooking
Nutritional information available at FineCooking.com

(This photo: Fine Cooking)

Yields 6 cups
Serves 6 to 8 as an appetizer 

INGREDIENTS

DIRECTIONS

Make Ahead Tips

The finished soup can be refrigerated, covered, for up to 2 days. Adjust the seasoning and garnish just before serving.

Bon Appétit (June 2013)

We spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about vinaigrettes.

Because we have so many salad greens at our disposal right now, from the garden and our CSA, almost every night we do the vinaigrette hokey-pokey: you put a little of this in a jar, a little of that in a jar, and then you shake it all about.

Our basic vinaigrette tip: Use a basic ratio of 3 parts oil to 1 part vinegar. If it doesn't taste good, just keep adding ingredients until it does. Eventually, you'll get there (or you'll need to find a bigger jar). 

With vinaigrette on the brain, we were very pleased with the one on this Strawberry, Almond and Pea Salad. It's a simple mix of white wine vinegar, whole grain mustard, poppy seeds, sugar and vegetable oil. It's unlike our typical vinaigrettes, which are darker and heavier. It's really a simple, sweet poppy seed dressing. (Normally, we're not huge poppy seed dressing fans. The store-bought varieties can tend to be off-puttingly sweet. But we adored this one. Perhaps because it's paired with such amazing flavors.)

 

It was the combination of strawberries and peas that initially caught our attention when flipping through Bon Appétit. We loved the idea of pairing sweet spring peas with sweeter spring strawberries. On a bed of spicy arugula and with a crunch of almonds, this is a very good salad that we heartily recommend. It makes for an excellent weekend lunch (that's when we ate it) or as the main course at night with a bit of grilled chicken on the side (we did that, too). 

You may have issues sourcing ingredients for this salad, but there are easy substitutions (or omissions) that can be made. The recipe calls for Marcona almonds, but we couldn't find any. Instead, we subbed in plain, blanched almonds that we purchased in the baking aisle of our supermarket. We're sure Marcona almonds would be great in this, but we still loved our plain old almonds. 

The salad also calls for pea tendrils, which is an ingredient we have in abundance, both growing in our backyard and available at our farmers market. If you can't get pea tendrils, just leave them out. The rest of the salad is so good, you won't miss them. (Ours, by the way, from our backyard, were a bit too tough in parts -- lesson learned.) 

And now, as we're writing this, we see that we also omitted the Parmesan shavings -- they are absent from the photograph. That, friends, is just an error on our part. 

We guess you'll have to try the salad with the Parmesan and let us know what you think.