Carrot catastrophe

[Anonymous Modernist 799]

We were at Maxim's Sur la Table demo on Modernist Cuisine at home last week, and enjoyed the evening thoroughly. For me, one of the highlights was the very simple, but very scrumptious carrot soup, made in a pressure cooker. So for dinner tonight, I thought I would attempt to replicate that soup. What could go wrong? Carrots, butter, baking soda, salt, and a pressure cooker -- all things I have on hand. I followed instructions to the letter, painstakingly cutting out the core from about 30 tender new carrots, ensuring that I actually ended up with 500 grams of carrots, weighing butter, salt, baking soda, then plopping everything into our pressure cooker. Husband and I both wondered at the lack of water in the recipe, but thought that, since it wasn't called for in the ingredients, we wouldn't add any. So then we ramped up the PC to the recommended 15 PSI, and set the timer for 50 minutes, as per the instructions. At about 30 minutes, the carrots were smelling wonderfully sweet and caramelly. At about 35 minutes, there was a whiff of scorch in the air. By 40 minutes, I knew things were hopeless, but persevered. At 50 minutes, we opened all the windows and turned the fan on high, then scraped out bits of carroty charcoal from the PC, before putting it into hot soapy water to soak for a day or two, and went to plan B, and defrosted some lovely tomato bisque we made earlier this week.

What went wrong? My strong suspicion is that 50 minutes cooking time is just too long. If so, perhaps the recipe should be amended. Or maybe we should have gone ahead and added some water at the start. If so, how much?

I really, really liked this soup, and would dearly like to be able to make it for Thanksgiving dinner next week.

[Anonymous Modernist 310]

pear tart said:

What went wrong? My strong suspicion is that 50 minutes cooking time is just too long. If so, perhaps the recipe should be amended. Or maybe we should have gone ahead and added some water at the start. If so, how much?

I really, really liked this soup, and would dearly like to be able to make it for Thanksgiving dinner next week.

You're absolutely right. If you look at the errata:

On pages 3·301and6·150, the recipe for Caramelized Carrot Soup should call for 4g of young gin­ger with ascal­ing of 0.8% and ‚“Carrot juice, brought to boil and cen­trifuged” should read ‚“Carrot juice, brought to sim­mer and cen­trifuged.” In step four, ‚“50min” should read ‚“20min.”

It's always a good idea to keep a copy of the errata on hand and take a quick look before starting a recipe. Unfortunately the downloadable pdf errata is not up to date with the online errata since april.

The only other thing is that you need to be careful to not heat the pressure cooker too much. You're not supposed to have steam coming out continuously.

Good luck for thanksgiving

[Judy Wilson]

Make sure that you also melt the butter and coat the carrots thoroughly before closing the pc. We actually just put this in our recipe library today, with a video!

There's also a pretty good discussion here on our forum, where some people have even decided to add water. While that's not one of our tips, it seems to have worked for them!

What else will you be making for Thanksgiving?

[Anonymous Modernist 799]

thanks, Judy. I was going by the recipe that was in the hand-out from Max at the demo. Too bad about the errata - grrr... Oh well, all that was really lost were about $1.50 worth of carrots and a half-hour scrubbing out the scorch. I will definitely try this recipe again - it really was a knock-out flavour.

Thanksgiving menu is a bit up in the air, as one of the guests has just spent the past weekend in hospital with bleeding ulcers - I suspect he'll be reduced to eating cranberry jello and turkey broth, poor soul! Otherwise, the only definite must-haves on the menu is this carrot soup (either with toasted coconut, or maybe savoury popcorn - haven't decided which) and a pumpkin cheesecake.

[Judy Wilson]

pear tart,

Thanks for alerting us. Max has contacted Sur la Table to notify everyone of the mistake. I hope the rest of the evening went well!

Good luck on round two of the carrot soup!