Any cook worth his or her salt aims for perfection.
Those pesky imperfections are reason to keep making a dish until it comes out right. But sometimes, cooks just have to admit they’re beat — when the results don’t taste good enough to justify the effort involved.
I threw in the towel this weekend after my second bout with chestnut soup. I think several members of my family wondered why anyone would eat soup made with chestnuts. But I was smitten with the soup’s European connotation. Apparently traditional to a Spanish Christmas feast, it’s also eaten in Italy and France.
Encountering fresh chestnuts at Asia Grocery Market a month or so back sparked the experiment. I brought them home only to find the recipe in my soup cookbook called for jarred chestnuts. Note these are not the same as water chestnuts.
No matter, I thought, I’ll just substitute the fresh ones. I set about making the soup, which basically consists of the chestnuts, shallots, carrot, celery and vegetable stock. The chestnuts were fairly easy to peel. I just cut them in half with a sharp chef’s knife and pulled the shell away.
My recipe called for simply adding the jarred chestnuts and then pureeing the soup. It was obvious the fresh nuts weren’t going to budge under my immersion blender, so I finely ground the nuts in the food processor before adding them to the soup. As you might guess, the nut particles didn’t disintegrate any further, and I was left with a consistency halfway between cream soup and pesto.
Surprisingly, my husband ate this concoction. But I couldn’t let the batch be his only basis for opinion. So I bought more chestnuts, looked up recipes for chestnut soup online and set about redeeming myself.
This time I roasted the nuts by scoring the bottoms with a knife and baking them for 10 minutes at 450 degrees in a pan with about a half inch of water. I prepared the vegetables as before and laboriously set about peeling the chestnuts, which took longer this time because I endeavored to free the roasted nut from the layer of skin under the shell. I estimate it took about 30 minutes to peel about a dozen nuts. Whew!
Part of the challenge was refraining from eating nuts as I peeled them. Unlike some people I’ve talked to, I get the fanfare around roasted chestnuts. Still hot, they have a sweetish flavor and starchy consistency not unlike a cooked potato. Perhaps this is why anyone thought to put them in soup in the first place.
I simmered the peeled chestnuts in the soup for about 30 minutes. Before pureeing, I skimmed out all the skins missed during the peeling process. The nuts then blended seamlessly, resulting in a silky texture, but no discernible nutty flavor.
The addition of half-n-half and a little sherry was the only redeeming aspect of this dish. Considering that I could add these ingredients to many a cream soup, I decided the recipe wasn’t worth it.
If I want chestnuts, I’ll simply roast them and eat them whole, finding perfection in simplicity.
