Rotisserie Chicken and Leek Soup

I don't think I've ever made chicken soup before, but to be fair, I really don't make soup very often. After making this recipe, I'll have to make it more often -- this was great! It starts off with a chicken. The recipe calls for a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket, but Ruhlman recommends just roasting a chicken yourself. I had plenty of spare time, so that's just what I did. My trussing skills leave something to be desired, but I stuffed the cavity with a lemon, sliced in half, some thyme, and a shallot, so it wasn't particularly important. Roasting a chicken is actually really, really easy; after stuffing the cavity, I doused it in salt and tossed it in the oven for an hour.

The leeks were simple to prepare, though a pain to clean. Once the chicken was done, the green part of the leek went in the soup pot with the carcass, a carrot, a parsnip, some tomato paste, garlic, and bay leaves. That simmered for an hour, and in a cast iron pot, I softened the white part of the leeks in some butter. Once the leeks softened, I strained in the stock and added the meat. After simmering for a couple minutes to warm the chicken, it was ready. And boy was it! Just the right amount of saltiness, layers upon layers of flavor, and a silky butteriness to the liquid, I can't wait to have it for lunch again tomorrow.

French Onion Soup

I spent Sunday making French Onion Soup. It wasn't all active time, of course, but I started at 1, and we ate at 8, and even then I had to speed the recipe up. How did it come to this? Well, I follow Michael Ruhlman's blog, over at Ruhlman.com, and a while back he posted a recipe for French Onion Soup. I love French Onion Soup, but rarely get it at restaurants since I rarely get an appetizer of any sort at restaurants. So I was pretty excited by the recipe. Unfortunately, it calls for sweating the onions over several hours, so it took a while for me to get around to it. But I'm glad I did!

The broth was great; rich and oniony. I had intended to add a bit of bourbon to each bowl, but it slipped my mind. I was out of sherry, so I used a mixture of vermouth and sherry vinegar. The crusty bread eagerly soaked up the broth, almost to the extent there was none left, and the Emmentaler cheese provided a great nutty edge to the dish. When I had it again two days later, the flavors were quite a bit more subtle. In general, it was an improvement, but the sweetness of the onions was overwhelming. They were so sweet, they tasted almost like apples! I'm glad I added beef broth to it. Ruhlman is adamantly against it, but I feel like the ratio of two parts water to one part broth gave it a lot more depth than it would have had otherwise, while still allowing the onion flavor to shine through.

If I had to do it again, I'd have the temperature a bit higher when sweating the onions. I had it almost all the way down, and it still wasn't done by the time we were starving at 8 o'clock. I think I could have dialed it up a bit higher, and not risked burning the onions. That would have meant dinner at a reasonable hour. Given the tendency of the bread to soak up the broth, I need either more liquid or thinner bread. I worry that thinner bread might just lose to much of the crunch. Recipe is after the jump.