The real mushroom soup
When I first moved to London I worked in the Neal Street Restaurant in Covent Garden. It was famous for its wild mushrooms, and my mate Gennaro used to go out every day during mushroom season to find them. It was in this restaurant that I tasted a real mushroom soup for the first time. Those awful tins of mushroom soup that we've all tasted just became a distant memory! The nice thing about nearly all mushrooms is that, if cooked correctly, they do have wonderful flavour. If you were to use a field of Portabello mushrooms to make a soup, just adding a tiny bit of dried porcini into the base would make the whole thing more luxurious.
Estimated Nutrition (whole recipe, rough)
Counts 14 of 17 ingredients — the other 3 aren't in our nutrition table and contribute nothing above, so the real totals are higher.
What these numbers assume — 14 portions →
| Ingredient | Portion assumed | kcal |
|---|---|---|
| Chicken | 100g cooked | 165 |
| Mascarpone | 2 tbsp (28g) | 120 |
| Olive Oil | 1 tbsp (14g) | 119 |
| Cheese | 1 oz (28g) cheddar | 113 |
| Oyster | 6 medium (84g) | 81 |
| Onion | 1 medium (110g) | 44 |
| Shiitake | 1/2 cup (73g) | 34 |
| Mushroom | 1/2 cup sliced (35g) | 15 |
| Lemon | juice of 1 lemon (48ml) | 12 |
| Black Pepper | 1 tsp ground (2.3g) | 6 |
| Garlic | 1 clove (3g) | 4 |
| Thyme | 1 tsp dried (1.4g) | 4 |
| Parsley | 1 tbsp chopped fresh (3.8g) | 1 |
| Salt | 1 tsp (6g) | 0 |
| Porcini | not in our table | 0 |
| Chanterelle | not in our table | 0 |
| Truffle | not in our table | 0 |
Totals for the whole recipe, adding one typical portion per ingredient — listed above. Quantities in the recipe are not counted, so this is a rough guide only — not suitable for medical or dietary planning.
Ingredients
- 1 small handful dried porcini
- olive oil
- 600 g mixed fresh wild mushrooms (chanterelles, girolles, trompettes de mort, shiitake, oyster), clean and sliced
- 2 cloves garlic, peeled and finely sliced
- 1 red onion, peeled and finely chopped
- 1 handful fresh thyme, leaves picked
- sea salt
- freshly ground black pepper
- 1 litre organic chicken or vegetable stock
- 1 handful fresh flat-leaf parsley, leaves picked and roughly chopped
- 1 tablespoon mascarpone cheese
- 1 lemon
- truffle oil, optional