What you need for this to serve three to four people
Ingredients:
- some carrots - about 500 g or 1 lb would be good (see note below). I think organic carrots taste far better, but YMMV.
- Some garlic - say, one clove for each carrot or about eight cloves for 500 g.
- One chilli or chillies of an appropriate strength, fresh or dried. You can use powdered or flaked chilli if you wish
- One lime
- About 150 - 250 g of cashew nuts, not roasted
- 800 mL of good chicken stock; you can probably substitute vegetable stock if you want this to be vegan.
- Olive Oil
- salt and pepper.
(My phone lens has steamed up taking pictures of food, so these pictures aren't great, sorry).
Method
Preheat an oven to around 200 °C. A fan oven could be slighty lower, and I believe that the gas oven equivalent to 200 °C is around Gas Mark 6.
Pull a garlic bulb into enough separate cloves, and take the flakey, tissue-y skin off the bulbs by rubbing, leaving the tougher peel in place.
The picture shows how much garlic I used for the four carrots above, de-tissued, but still in its skin:
I always use more than one clove per carrot because we're going to roast these unpeeled garlic cloves so that the inside is soft and creamy, with each clove being essentially a little sachet of roast garlic puree and absolutely delicious. I know that I'll eat half of them before they get to the soup.
The carrots need to be soft enough to be mashable, and are even better if beginning to char ever so slightly on the outside; the garlic cloves need to be squashy when you press them, but not burnt.
In my experience, the carrot can take about five to ten minutes longer than the garlic to get to the right state, so for absolute perfection, you could add the garlic cloves to the roasting tin about five to ten minutes after the carrots have been put into the oven and leave the carrots in for 45 minutes in total. If you need to do something else and not fuss about the timing, it's absolutely fine to roast both for the slightly shorter period of time.
If you're using a fresh chilli, I'd add strips in around the same time that you add the garlic (I haven't tried this with fresh chilli yet, but you don't want it burnt to a crisp; I'd imagine that charred would be fine).
While the carrots are in the oven, make cashew nut butter.
The picture shows the cashew nuts after roasting.
At first the cashews make very a very fine breadcrumb texture
.
After about three minutes, the fine breadcrumb texture begins to clag-up a little bit, looking like small bits of rubber, making bigger crumbs and sticking to the sides. Keep blending and pushing the mixture down onto the blades.
.
This picture shows the cashew-nut mixture after the oil has been added. The mixture is not paler in reality but, interestingly, the shinyness of the mixture with added oil meant that more of the flash was reflected back to the camera and the whole picture became much paler as a result. I've reduced the brightness as much as I can so that you can see the texture.
The mixture is pretty much like a smooth peanut butter, and firm enough to hold its shape when you quenelle it.
The mixture is pretty much like a smooth peanut butter, and firm enough to hold its shape when you quenelle it.
The carrots will probably have finished roasting by now, as well.
Put all of the carrot chunks into a saucepan, and add the roasted garlic and the dry chilli, if you are using that.
This bit is messy. Using a very sharp knife, chop off the end of one of your squashy roasted garlic cloves. Squeeze the the soft puree inside the peel out onto the carrots in the saucepan. Lick your fingers and repeat with the rest of the cloves.
When you've got as much roasted garlic into the pan as possible, use a stick blender to blend the garlic, carrot and chilli together. Add the chicken or vegetable stock as you proceed, until you've got the consistency you want.
With the amount of carrots shown in the picture at the top, I used about 400 ml of stock to get a thick soup that I could pour.
Reheat the soup in the saucepan, taste and add salt and pepper as necessary.
Don't stir the lime in - part of the joy of this soup is that not every mouthful contains the acidic lime; the lime is used as a condiment rather than an ingredient.
Eat the soup with a small portion of the cashew nut butter in every spoonful - fantastic! I like to eat it with rice cakes.
Sounds fantastic! I'm going to try it ...
ReplyDeleteLet me know how it goes!
ReplyDeleteVery tasty! Had it for a starter for Christmas dinner. I was glad of the pictures showing the progress of the cashew butter, or I might have given up and thought my strange lumps meant it hadn't worked.
ReplyDeleteThanks! In fact, one of the recipes I 'doctored' for this, from Abel&Cole turned up in the box today, so it isn't original, but I did hope to add to it with the photographs. I'm now thinking about using smoked garlic powder and slightly less roast garlic.
Delete