Ras el Hanout Carrot Soup with Homemade Crème Fraîche
a snowstorm, a new spice blend, new soup tricks, AND crème fraîche from scratch
Things you’ll need: carrots, onion, stock, butter, oil, ras el hanout, rice (arborio if you have it) heavy cream, buttermilk, salt, and a wearable blanket.
with a little advice from this, this, this, and this
incidentally gluten-free, easily vegetarian.
Chapter 117
It’s funny watching your Midwest friends post love notes to your friends in Texas, explaining that they need to turn their faucets on to a steady drip overnight to keep their pipes from freezing. It is sweet, but also kind of terrifying because IT SNOWED IN TEXAS. Ok, it’s not that funny. Especially not for the people without power and no infrastructure to deal with any of this, so do we all finally agree that climate change is real?
Meanwhile, you’ve dug your car out for the third time in two weeks just to dig out a new parking spot that is not along a snow route and now the snow is deep enough to conceal a big dog or a small pony and you aren’t even sure where the sidewalk used to be.
It’s not the kind of weather you want to go out in. This is the kind of weather that makes you look at your cabinets and depleted crisper and go, “Well, I can make a soup.” You can always make a soup. Pretty much any vegetable can become soup and you happen to have a lot of carrots from that time when you thought you might make carrot cake even though you know that you were never going make a carrot cake because, well, it’s baking.
You look up stuff about carrot soup and find out that there is this French soup called Potage de Crécy, which sounds very fancy because it is in French. When you dive deeper, the internet tells you that it can be made with cream or not, with carrot juice or not, pureed or not, with coconut milk or not, etc etc.
Since you love a flexible recipe, you dive even deeper and lo! Your carrot soup recipe rabbit hole has revealed a brand-new method of soup thickening that does not involve flour or bread! All you have to do is add between 2 and 6 tablespoons of rice and let it simmer for about 30 minutes before you puree the whole thing. Suddenly a world of pureed soup has opened before you! Oh joy!
This whole carrot soup endeavor has also provided you the opportunity to try out a new spice blend: Ras el Hanout. (This whole making-do thing is becoming a watershed of various excitements!)
Ras el Hanout is a North African spice blend of a dozen (or more, or less) spices as dictated by the particular family recipe or spice blender. The list can include cardamom, cumin, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, allspice, dry ginger, chili peppers, coriander seed, peppercorn, sweet and/or hot paprika, fenugreek, and dry turmeric (or so says Wikipedia).
All of those things sound delicious with carrots and you happened to pick some up from this place because it’s local (not sponsored), but you could also get it from here, here, or here (all also unsponsored, just helping out) or google it and make your own because maybe you can’t get out your front door to do anything else today anyway.
(Speaking of projects to take on while snowed in, did you know how simple it is to make crème fraîche (like fancy sour cream) from scratch?! Add 2 Tablespoons of buttermilk to 1 cup of heavy cream, cover it, and let it just sit there for like 12-24 hours. That’s it. WILL WONDERS NEVER CEASE!?)
Now that you are armed with overwhelming excitement and 2 pounds of carrots, it’s time to turn a few basic ingredients into warm and bubbling joy.
In your exhaustive research, many recipes called for sugar, honey, or maple syrup, but you’ve decided to work with carrot’s natural sugars and roast them in the oven for a bit instead.
Wash, peel, and chop 2 pounds of carrots. Toss them with a few good shakes of Ras el Hanout, oil, and salt. Roast at 400-425 for 20-40 minutes, until they are lightly browned and fork-tender (or until you don’t really want to wait any longer because you know that they are going to finish cooking in the stock anyway).
In your soup pot, heat up some oil and sauté a chopped Vidalia onion (because it’s also sweet). Feel free to add some garlic and then your roasted carrots, about ¼ cup of arborio rice, and 6 cups of stock from the freezer (veggie or chicken or just water with some bouillon, you’re making-do).
Give it a taste. Add between a teaspoon and a tablespoon (to your liking) of Ras el Hanout, maybe a dash more ginger, and a little salt to taste. Bring it to a boil and then let it simmer for about 30 minutes until everything (including the rice) is tender.
Get out your emersion or stand blender and puree away! If this is the only thing that you are doing today, you can also push it through a fine-mesh strainer at the end, to really get that velvety mouthfeel, but that’s just more mess and you already forgot to cover the top of your stand blender with a towel and the steam pressure popped the top and now you have soup on your ceiling.
With the soup pureed and back in its soup pot (and a little bit in your hair), it’s time for the finishing touches. Taste it. Adjust your salt and seasoning. When it’s just about the way you like it, stir in a tablespoon of unsalted butter (another very exciting tip you picked up from the many open tabs on your computer).
Taste it again. Mmmm. Ok, taste it again, just to make sure.
Serve with a dollop of your homemade crème fraîche. Carrot cake would have been good, but this is even better.
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