You will need a blender for the recipe, as part of the joy of the dish is the smooth velvety soup within which lurks the oyster.
Seeing that the winter months have nearly ended, I decided to jump on this recipe so I could use oysters that were still nice and fat as opposed to the anemic and watery options come the summer. I’m also that much closer to finishing a section of the book, which is a bit surprising since I was truly afraid that I would have burned out on updating this website before that could happen. Maybe there is hope for me yet.
This is the first time that I’ve ever used the entire leek–minus the root–for a dish. I was a little concerned that longer green sections might taste like the wooden-esqe core of an older leek.
My wonderful wife prepped both the onion and the potatoes for me. While I’m sure it was done out of the kindness of her heart, I suspect that hunger played a bigger driving force than she would care to admit.
The book asks for a pan big enough to take all the ingredients, but unfortunately my largest pan couldn’t hold just the leeks, onion and garlic. I was forced to move to a largish pot. I let the aforementioned vegetables soften in a melted stick of butter.
Once everything was nice and giving, the potatoes were mixed in and left to cook for a few minutes. Chicken stock was then poured into the pot and I turned the heat up to attain a gentle boil.
With the potatoes cooked completely I seasoned the soup with some grey sea salt and fresh ground black pepper.
Something that still confuses me is that this recipe should supposedly serve six people. After all of the blending, I was left with just under 4 liters of soup! I suppose six really hungry people might able to polish it all off and then be full for the rest of the next day.
After blending everything, I put it all back in the pot and added every last drop of oyster liquor I could coax out of the little plastic container the pre-shucked oysters were in.
With so much soup I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough of the oyster liquor to really “get” that flavor while eating. Thankfully that wasn’t the case.
Two oysters were placed in each bowl, and then covered with the leek and potato puree.
The dish completed. It looks pretty much like pea soup, right? At least I think it does. A few scallion slices were added as a garnish to break up the sea of green.
I feel like I’m starting to sound redundant when I talk about the flavors of the dishes. I’m afraid that “rustic” and “homey” are soon going to wear out their welcome in my vocabulary. That being said, this dish is very, very homey. The leeks and potatoes work well with each other, and the briney liquor from the oysters expresses itself in the aftertaste of every spoonful. The oysters are really just a nice little extra at the bottom of the bowl as far as I’m concerned. The soup is the clear star, and something I would really like for lunch on a cold winter day or if I was recovering from a bout of the sniffles.
One down, one hundred and eleven to go.
