Suppenkasper or Diana loves soup

I love soup. I have loved soup for as long as I can remember. I could eat soup every single day and at any time of the day. Thin and clear ones, vegetable, fish or meat, creamy or lumpy. Sounds a bit pervy? Not really, I hope!
In 2007 I travelled through Japan for a couple of weeks and I really got into Miso soup - even for breakfast. I am talking about the savoury, full of soy protein, kind.


Today I went out for lunch with some girls to have a ladies lunch. My friend Barbara ordered fried eggs with extra tomatoes. As I saw the tomatoe water running over the fried eggs I suddenly had an epiphany! Tonight I was about to have soup. Nothing really exciting you might think but please bear with me - I was going to prepare a consomme - the baptism of fire for any chef.

So I bought the the very few ingredience you need to have to produce a tomato consomme (Mirepoix, tomatoes, basil) and turkey minced meat, cream and eggs for the turkey basil buttons.

I also got some chili (rather mild ones - this is Germany after all - the land of salt and pepper). I just wanted to have the extra twist in my consomme.

All ingredience are generously chopped and get thrown into one big saucepan filled with water.

Everything is only vaguely measured and after 30 mins of slow simmering the consomme base should look like this.
The base now get filtered through a colander and leaves a smoth liquid. This liquid however is not quite right for a consomme, it still needs to get purified. I didn't want to go really wild tonight so I decided to stick with a single consomme, not a consomme double, which is purified twice. And that does take forever!

While the filtered liquid gets the chance to cool down, I prepare the clearing mixture. Just take a bit minced beef and one egg white, mixed together. It is vital that the mixture cools down in the fridge too.

I then started to prepare the mixture for my turkey basil buttons. I needed a smooth mass that I could squeeze through an icing bag. I chopped up some basil leaves and mixed the minced turkey with cream and 2 eggs as well as an egg yog and some salt and pepper. 

Meanwhile I started boiling some water to prepare the buttons. I squeezed the content of the icing bag over an oven grid into the boiling water.

Again, I used my gut feeling to judge when the buttons are done. And you want to be careful with Salmonella and all.

The filtered consomme base can now be purified. The protein mix together with the liquid are slowly heated up again, The cloudy bits get trapped within the protein mix and that leaves a clear consomme.

The liquid now needs to be poured through a tea towel to get the last precious drops out of the consomme mix.





A few more basil leaves for decoration and a nice big soup plate e voila - Bon appetite!