Chef Stephan Marshall
Corn, Coconut Milk, and Lemon Grass Soup With Crab Salad
We’re going to be doing a Corn, Coconut Milk, and Lemon Grass Soup with a little bit of Crab Salad on top. So in the corn soup we have prepared a little bit of corn for you but, you really want to take a look whenever you buy corn you want to take a look at all the kernels and make sure your nice and fall okay I don’t know if I have to agree with you and soup market about this but, you want to take your thumb, open one up and you want to smash just a little bit of it and then taste it.
The reason why is because some corn is sweet and some corn is not that sweet. You want to find a nice sweet, sweet corn to do this dish. So, today we have a corn and we have a nice big red onion and this, this is a monster of vegetables called the celery root. Now, this is where the celery actually grows when you buy this it grows underneath the ground and the celeries stock comes up like this. Okay this is not a very widely use vegetable in the home, celery is more widely use but, this in the restaurant industry is king and the beauty of this is you can make purees with it, you can do it the flavor soups as well, you can do numerous things with celery root. You can eat it raw in the salads also very nice in the salad.
So, why don’t we start here by we going to take our onion cut our onion in half, always remember the watch for your fingers okay this is a little technique that we use in the restaurant business in order to get the onions nice and small and all of them uniform. Okay so we start by just cutting that just little tiny slits inside of the onion, then we take that about that much and then you want to take and you want to cut about quarter of an inch, then we cut another quarter of an inch down and then basically just chop down.
And as you can see it gets all nice and uniform to pieces. You want to always start it off with a little bit of butter and olive oil and the recipe calls for butter, we you know you say we’re going to use a little bit of oil as well. Olive oil what that’s going to do is that’s going to prevent the cream and the butter from burning. As you sautéing the onions, that’s also another little trick that you guys can use at home.
When we take the celery root okay you want to make sure when ever your celery root that you want to skin the outside of the celery root. So you chop that you see how nice and white this is inside. This is actually a beautiful, beautiful vegetable. I love using celery root. Okay because its more of a mild flavor than the celery, okay so we’re going to ahead and we’re going to just take the skin of the celery root and bring that up on its side and you want to make sure to get all of the skin as we said earlier it was growing in the soils so you want to remove all that soil.
And then go ahead and you want to cut the vegetable and the small pieces again just like you did with the onion and keep an eye on your butter over here so we cut this in the small pieces, a very important whenever you do any type of the soup that you always want to make everything uniform because there’s nothing worse in getting a piece that’s cooked and then you get another piece that’s raw. So we put this in and that should be enough right there so we go ahead and our butters melt it, put our onions in and a little bit of celery root in, now we’re just going to sauté this for a little bit, sauté very well, so today we’re going to go ahead and we’re just going to peel the corn like 0422.
When you get down and you see the knife how to melt that’s on a knife you want to scrape all of this like this and what you’re doing here is you’re getting all of the nice sweet flavor of the corn in there. You don’t want to remove that, so what we did is we had prepared some parts some earlier and it gets a little messy all right as you can see so we have our corn here, go ahead and check our onions, now this process is only about one minute, you just want to really get some of that raw flavor of the onion whenever you cook an onion you always remove the gas from it and the gas and the gas usually in its as you’re cooking it.
We go ahead and put our corn in there and so I tell you that round just a little bit. Now, this recipe also falls over our jalapeño and some lemon grass here. Okay this funny looking root if you will. Okay so we start and we sauté that just a sauté that just a little bit more. Sautéing what’s sautéing this that helps bring out the natural flavors of the product that you’re using. So then we’re going to take our jalapeño that our jalapeño in half now depending on whether you like spicy or not spicy, you can remove the seeds in.
Okay I particularly like to take the seeds out because you can always add spice to the dish which you can never really remove it. So, we’re going to cut this in the quarters and just basically remove the seeds like this and we’re just going to drop them right in our soup and we going to take this one out but, let’s see one more. So we got our jalapeño inside. Now, we’re going to take our lemon grass.
Now, I want to peel of the outside skin of the lemon grass because it gets little bit dirty on the outside so we take the outside of I go ahead and just cut it directly in half and put just a little bit more and you want to kind of peel this piece right here off. So you can remove all the dead pieces of the lemon grass. You cut a clean up very nicely, check our corn again and you know very important you also don’t want to get any color into the soup, because at the end you want a nice beautiful yellow silky color to the soup.
So we’re going to add our chicken stock now. And also another technique when you make soup you never really wants your soup to be too thin. Okay and again you can always make the soup thinner but, to make it thicker you going to have to do a home noodle soup to make it thicker. So, when you pour the liquid in you want to make sure that its about an inch above your product because when you puree it then its going to turn nice and smooth and you’ll have a more with thick consistency and then you can finish it, you can finish thin in it by either French in this recipe with coconut milk, we have cream or you can use a little more chicken stock,.
So our lemon grass you want to go ahead and cut the lemon grass stem directly in half and you can see the interior of it because its actually it’s great, great stuff and you want to put it on your board flat and give it a cup of cracks and what that does that starts to release the flavor of the lemon grass. Okay and we put this in big pieces because if we put in small pieces when it comes time to actually puree the soup you going to have to pick all the time and pieces out. So you want to make sure to leave the end right here for the lemon grass in tact, otherwise it will start to flake the part and you going to have a real hard time fishing to your soup.
So, we going to put our cream inside and the last thing that we’re going to add is we’re going to add a little bit of the coconut milk but, we’re not going to really do that until the final process because if you boil a coconut milk you tend to separate. So okay so the coconut milk is really just to in flavor and ingredient. Now, that our soup is about ready we are going to remove the lemon grass and we take our lemon grass, take that out like that another one out. Now, we’re going to get our handy dandy blender here you guys are familiar with what this is, its basically your blender on the stick.
So best invention in years we use to always have to throw all the soups in the blender, this stick it right in the bowl there so that we could turn that on, we have all the safety advises on everything and you need any three hands now a days and so we put that in there. Once it started you only use one hand so we go ahead and make the soup.
So once that’s mixed very well so always use here if you’re at home to wash it off before it dries. This one of the socket gets dry it’s really tough to claim. Now that our soup is ready we take one of this things, it’s called the china cup because it looks like a Chinese hat so we term it china cup. So if you don’t have one of this you can find one of this at anywhere in the gourmet food stores and I’m sure they will have this to sell to you but, if you don’t find them you can go to just a regular store and get a mashed strainer and then they’ll add – there’s a service same purpose.
There’s a last in the home the 50 years. You can pass this on your children, These are really, really durable. So we’re going to strain our soup and there’s a really easy process and just pour it right in as you can see it comes out the bottom nice and thin without any type of impurities into your soup and the reason that we do this in the restaurant business is because this is going to take all of the skins out of your soup. Okay it’s going to be a much easier to eat soup and you know the last thing you want us to be dining with somebody next thing you know you got pieces of corn over the front of your teeth but, that’s not very sexy and very attractive have that.
So we put majority soups in the restaurant business we put to fine china cup along with the little larger holes. Okay whenever you do any type of sauce or soup that you always want to push, down okay and wait till its completely dry because a lot of the flavors that you get in your soup is going to be trapped inside of the vegetable or the kernel in this case so you want to extract all that flavor okay.
Then once our soup is ready and in this stuff here you can throw in the garbage or if you have a farm at home and you have the pigs you can give to the pigs, give it to the dogs, if you want I used just go ahead and just get rid of it and now we have our soup here that we’ve made a little earlier and as you can see nice and the last thing that you want to add to the soup is live with the coconut milk. Now, when you buy the coconut milk you want to buy the coconut milk you want to buy the coconut milk that has no sweetness to it. Okay’s so there’s a Thai style coconut milk but there’s no to coconut milk that you use behind the bars and that is more the sweetened coconut milk for this particular purpose you will be really don’t want to have the sweet coconut milk.
So we got that going and we are going to get our crab out and we’re going to make a nice little crab salad. I’ve all of the herbs here okay so this is a cilantro and actually you don’t this one is cilantro so it looks like the time parsley sometimes I even get confused the cilantro is basically is almost – I attended to say sometimes it’s just like a timorous parsley then we have chervil which I tend to call it French parsley and then a little bit of fresh chives, we cut those up a little bit and then you cut them individually or you can do it this way which is much faster and just put them all together and you start chopping.
You always want to make sure that as in everything else to keep everything nice and uniform, so we chop that up and put some into our crab mixture and a little bit of salt and a little bit of pepper and you always want to make sure you use a fresh pepper the spices that you buy in the store ordinarily could be anywhere from six months to two years old okay and you always want to make sure to have nice fresh spices whenever you cook.
So I mix that up and very, very simple in this dish and we put some soup in there and that was a great dish, I love this dish I like it because it has a nice sweet flavor to it but then it’s not too over powering with the lemon grass and the cilantro or the jalapeño so we’re going to put that right in the center, add a nice little garnish to it, this is called—so when you see a recipe it says—of chervil this is actually what it means and here is your lemon grass soup.
