Creamy Seafood Soup with Frozen Seafood Mix Recipe
Once, while in the US, I went to the Pacific coast, to Monterey Bay, to see the aquarium. Afterwards we walked out to the ocean and went into an excellent seafood restaurant standing on stilts right over the water, Fish Hopper: Seafood & Steaks.
At the entrance, like a commercial break, they were treating anyone who wanted to a wonderful culinary masterpiece, clam chowder. They poured a little for tasting into a small hollowed-out bread roll. As I later learned, it was the New England version, New England clam chowder, a creamy seafood soup.
Unlike the Manhattan version (Manhattan clam chowder), it's made with cream and no tomatoes. It's hard to say what a clam is: explanations vary widely and are quite confusing. As I understand it, it's a collective name for any edible shellfish except mussels and oysters. The soup gets vegetables: potatoes, onion, celery, sometimes carrot. It's served with crackers or in a sourdough bread bowl.
Clam chowder is considered a traditional American dish. In Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, whose first chapters take place in Massachusetts, one whole chapter is devoted to a seafood soup called chowder. In translation, however, this soup turned into “boiled fish”.
Restaurants often make clam chowder to their own recipes, straying quite far from the classic. Although there's no shortage of arguments about what the classic actually is. Chefs interpret the rules of this soup quite freely and most often cook it by instinct rather than by recipe.
Back home, I started looking for a way to recreate clam chowder at least roughly. One day we happened to buy a frozen shellfish mix at the store, a “seafood cocktail”. It's a decent mix with 6-7 kinds of sea creatures, and it's perfect for making a seafood soup. This soup doesn't claim to be clam chowder, but it turns out very tasty, affordable and quick. Let's make a creamy seafood soup inspired by clam chowder.
Ingredients
2 servings
- Seafood mix 250 g
- Onion 1
- Carrot 1
- Celery root and parsnip 50 g
- Green peas 100 g
- Cream or milk 0.5 l
- Butter 50 g
- Flour, salt, pepper, dried herbs (basil, marjoram, savory, oregano) to taste
Step-by-step recipe
- A frozen seafood mix usually contains octopus tentacles cut into small pieces, squid rings, mussels, shrimp tails, bits of scallop and other sea creatures. The seafood mix should be well frozen with no visible traces of frozen water; that's a sure sign it hasn't been thawed.
- Take celery root, parsnip and carrot in equal parts by weight; you can add parsley root if you like. How many vegetables go into the seafood soup is up to you. By the way, a dried mix of soup roots containing all the roots you need works well too. They cook down nicely in the soup.
- It's handier to make this seafood soup with vegetables and cream in a small deep sauté pan, although soups are usually made in a pot.
- Peel the celery root, parsnip, carrot and onion. Cut the onion and roots into small cubes, about the size you'd cut for Olivier salad or a little smaller.
- Melt a piece of butter and fry the chopped onion in it until soft.
- As soon as the onion starts to brown, add the chopped carrot, celery and parsnip, and the green peas; they don't need to be thawed. Fry the vegetables for 10 minutes over medium-high heat, stirring.
- Then turn down the heat. Season with salt, pepper and dried herbs. Add a third of a cup of water and simmer the vegetables under a lid until they're almost done.
- It's best to prepare the seafood mix for the soup first. Put the frozen seafood in a small saucepan and cover with water so the water covers the shellfish completely. Bring the water with the seafood just to a boil; there will be a lot of foam and the water will turn cloudy. Immediately rinse the thawed seafood under running water. Then cut all the shellfish into small pieces.
- Add the shellfish to the vegetables in the sauté pan.
- Simmer the vegetables and seafood for 1-2 minutes, no longer, and immediately add the hot milk or cream.
- Beforehand, whisk 2 tbsp of flour with 150 ml of room-temperature water in a cup. It should be a very thin batter. Strain the flour mixture through a tea strainer to get rid of lumps.
- As soon as the milk in the pan starts to boil, start pouring in the flour mixture in a thin stream, stirring the seafood soup quite vigorously. Flour thickens the soup very quickly and well, so the consistency, which depends on how much flour you add, is entirely up to you.
- When the soup is as thick as you want, stop adding the flour mixture. Bring the seafood soup to a gentle boil and let it simmer under a lid for 2-3 minutes.
- Serve the seafood soup right away while it's hot. You can serve it with fresh white bread or salted crackers.
- If you want something exotic, get small (saucer-sized) plain or sourdough bread rolls; they're sold in large supermarkets. Cut off the bottom crust with a knife and pull out the crumb with your hands. Put the bread in a deep plate and pour the seafood soup into it.
| Serves: | 2 servings |
| Calories: | 70 |
| Prep: | 15 mins |
| Cook: | 30 mins |
| Total: | 45 mins |
| Category: | Soups |
| Cuisine: | American cuisine |
| Rating: |
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4.3
(6)
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