Monday, November 14, 2011
What a load of old lentils
Been making a fair bit of lentil soup lately so thought it proper to record the experience.
Base mix is tap water, orange lentils, usually between half a pound and a pound, butter, onions and some form of diced pork. Simmer lentils and water; gently fry onions and pork in butter; blend with a spoon (not a blender) 5-10 minutes before consumption. Overall cooking time about an hour. Lentils should be soft but not completely dissolved; texture should be slightly grainy rather than smooth like custard. You should get a little surface water as the stuff cools and, depending of the sort of pork you use, it may set to a soft jelly when cold. One might, I suppose, serve it upside down with a garnish on a cold buffet.
Best fresh but does stand. Never tried freezing although we did take a thermos of the stuff up Schiehallion once.
Variation 1, is adding a bit of chopped garlic to the hot butter before the onion. Doing this more often than not at the moment.
Variation 2 is the supplementary vegetable. In the past I have mostly used carrots, not peeled (peeling takes away from the bite), sliced crosswise and added to the water and lentils about half an hour before consumption. But I am getting a bit tired of them. Have tried parsnips and mushrooms in the past: the parsnips did not work at all, the mushrooms did not work very well. Not helped by being a bit elderly; only in the soup at all to use them up. Yesterday I tried finely sliced (not chopped) white cabbage and that worked rather well.
Variation 3 is the pork, which really needs to be the bacon or spicy sausage sort. Otherwise the soup a bit bland. A couple of weeks ago I used unsmoked gammon without soaking it first. But what you lost in nicotine you certainly gained in salt, the resultant soup being a bit salty for our taste. Smoked gammon good. Kabanos (see http://www.kabanos.net/) and saucisson sec (see http://saucissonsec.net/) good. Sainsbury's bacon OK, getting better the more your pay for it. Yesterday we tried some smoked bacon from the Portuguese delicatessen attached to the Madeira Café just down river from Vauxhall Station (see http://www.madeiralondon.co.uk/. They also do very reasonable bacon sandwiches). Smoked bacon which comes in brick shaped lumps weighing maybe a quarter of a pound and which worked very well in the soup. Must remember to keep some in stock.
Variation 4 is the presence or absence of dead flies floating on the finished soup. This is not under user control and we have failed to find out what these unsavoury looking but tasteless & harmless black specks are, despite returning a packet of lentils to Tesco for investigation. We suspect that they are to do with the lentils having been stored for too long and the built-in bugs having started to hatch. Grains, for example pearl barley, certainly do this sort of thing. As it happens, the dead flies have been missing for a bit, but have surfaced once again in the most recent soup. Lentils from Sainsbury's.
Base mix is tap water, orange lentils, usually between half a pound and a pound, butter, onions and some form of diced pork. Simmer lentils and water; gently fry onions and pork in butter; blend with a spoon (not a blender) 5-10 minutes before consumption. Overall cooking time about an hour. Lentils should be soft but not completely dissolved; texture should be slightly grainy rather than smooth like custard. You should get a little surface water as the stuff cools and, depending of the sort of pork you use, it may set to a soft jelly when cold. One might, I suppose, serve it upside down with a garnish on a cold buffet.
Best fresh but does stand. Never tried freezing although we did take a thermos of the stuff up Schiehallion once.
Variation 1, is adding a bit of chopped garlic to the hot butter before the onion. Doing this more often than not at the moment.
Variation 2 is the supplementary vegetable. In the past I have mostly used carrots, not peeled (peeling takes away from the bite), sliced crosswise and added to the water and lentils about half an hour before consumption. But I am getting a bit tired of them. Have tried parsnips and mushrooms in the past: the parsnips did not work at all, the mushrooms did not work very well. Not helped by being a bit elderly; only in the soup at all to use them up. Yesterday I tried finely sliced (not chopped) white cabbage and that worked rather well.
Variation 3 is the pork, which really needs to be the bacon or spicy sausage sort. Otherwise the soup a bit bland. A couple of weeks ago I used unsmoked gammon without soaking it first. But what you lost in nicotine you certainly gained in salt, the resultant soup being a bit salty for our taste. Smoked gammon good. Kabanos (see http://www.kabanos.net/) and saucisson sec (see http://saucissonsec.net/) good. Sainsbury's bacon OK, getting better the more your pay for it. Yesterday we tried some smoked bacon from the Portuguese delicatessen attached to the Madeira Café just down river from Vauxhall Station (see http://www.madeiralondon.co.uk/. They also do very reasonable bacon sandwiches). Smoked bacon which comes in brick shaped lumps weighing maybe a quarter of a pound and which worked very well in the soup. Must remember to keep some in stock.
Variation 4 is the presence or absence of dead flies floating on the finished soup. This is not under user control and we have failed to find out what these unsavoury looking but tasteless & harmless black specks are, despite returning a packet of lentils to Tesco for investigation. We suspect that they are to do with the lentils having been stored for too long and the built-in bugs having started to hatch. Grains, for example pearl barley, certainly do this sort of thing. As it happens, the dead flies have been missing for a bit, but have surfaced once again in the most recent soup. Lentils from Sainsbury's.
# posted by Jim @ 1:53 AM 
