Tips to banish bitterness from your holiday mushroom soup
Mushroom soup kicks off the holiday feast. Remember to include two simple ingredients while cooking to ensure your Christmas Eve dinner doesn't start on a bitter note. You likely already have them in your kitchen.
After spending hours gathering and drying mushrooms or standing in long lines at the store, your mushroom soup is bitter—what a disappointment! To avoid this unpleasant surprise, add two straightforward ingredients. These will allow you to savour mushrooms' pure, woodsy flavour without any bitterness.
Bitter mushroom soup
When soaking the mushrooms, add onion and bay leaves. These ingredients effectively neutralize the unpleasant bitter taste, ensuring your dishes are delicious. This age-old method, trusted by our mothers and grandmothers, remains reliable.
Pour lukewarm, boiled water over the dried mushrooms. Add a quartered onion with its skins, toss in 3-4 bay leaves, and let it sit for several hours. Afterward, remove the soaked mushrooms, rinse them, and cook in fresh water. The bitterness will be drawn out by the onion and bay leaves, making the mushroom soup or pierogi filling taste fantastic.
How to save mushroom soup?
If you didn't add these ingredients initially and notice an unpleasant bitterness when tasting the soup, all hope is not lost. This issue may be due to improper cooking, using too many mushrooms, or incorrect soaking. Potatoes can be your solution. Add a few raw, washed, and peeled potatoes to the soup and cook for about 10-15 minutes. After this, remove them from the pot. They will absorb some of the bitterness without impacting the soup's flavour.
You can also lessen the bitterness by adding cream or milk. Take a ladle of the broth to temper the dairy before adding it to the entire pot, then bring it to a boil. Tempering is crucial to avoid curdling the soup.
