This soup, which ended up being the starter for my Monday night 3-bird orgy cum dinner party, is from the Cooking in Advance chapter, and is basically the French equivalent of the Italian Broth which I made last week. The main difference is that this one is not simmered for 3 hours, but for 7. Ahem. I’ve been avoiding this recipe for a while, for obvious reasons. But upon closer inspection, I realized it actually wasn’t that difficult, it’s just a pain in the arse. You put a boiling fowl and some beef shin in a pot, cover with cold water and let it sit for 30 minutes. Then slowly bring it to the boil, skim, add 120ml of water. You do that 3 times. Then add a variety of vegetables, and let it simmer very slowly for 7 hours.
This soup occupied my entire Saturday.
The recipe says to use a boiling fowl and some beef shin, I just asked my dad to go buy "the cheapest cut of beef you can find, with some bones in, for making soup". He came back with the following, which I thought would be perfect and flavour giving.
Gravy beef and bones
After 30 minutes simmering, however... I realised I was wrong. Blood started leaking out of the bones, and had turned the water an alarming shade of red. I nearly screamed.
Before the neighbours could call the police, however, I dumped the water, dumped the bones, and restarted with just the fowl and the bits of beef meat. After that, everything went swimmingly.
After adding the vegetables, I put it on a heat diffuser, to prevent "at all costs all the precious liquid's ungovernable evaporation".
soup pot
Incidentally, at the same time, on the next burner I was making the cream of chicken soup and the sweet risotto. By this stage, you really don't have to do anything to the consommé. It just does its own thing. I started cooking this at about 4pm, and with all the simmering and skimming and restarting factored in, it should have been ready to come off the heat at about 1:00am. Of course, at 1am, I was out on the town with friends and had completely forgotten about the bloddy consommé. Whoops. But when I came home at 3am, thankfully my mum had had the good sense to turn the stove off.
Cooked
Draining the soup the next day turned out to be a bit of an ordeal. It was a two-man job. (Mum and I). Of course, I wanted to be supercareful and not spill a drop.
We started by getting rid of the fowl...
...then carefully pouring the liquid through a colander into a pot...
...and then pouring that liquid through a sieve lined with a chux into another pot...
And then we put it in the fridge, and cleaned the kitchen (and ourselves) of all the grease and liquid. Phew!
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