No Croutons Required – Double Mushroom Soup

Lisa’s Kitchen invites foodie bloggers to a special vegetarian soup event – No Croutons Required – and for April she chose mushrooms as the ingredient to be featured, allowing salads with mushrooms as alternative option.

I love mushrooms, and among my favorite soups are potato soup and lentil soup with mushrooms, there is a vegetarian (yeast-based) funghi porcini soupbase in my part of the world, which is simply to die for, but this time I wanted to play things low-carb, which is why I came up with this soup:

Double Cream of Mushroom Soup

The “double” applies as well to the mushrooms as to the cream.

Ingredients

• 250 g / 8 oz white button mushrooms
• 1 onion
• 1/2 lemon
• a tablespoon of herbes de Provence
• salt & pepper
• a little butter
• 250 g / 8 oz brown button mushrooms (crimini)
• a little olive oil
• a handful of dried boletus / porcini mushrooms
• vegetable stock, about 800 ml
• 200 ml cream
• 100 g cream cheese, softened
• chopped herbs (parsley or chervil)

First you need to soak the dried porcini with a little hot (boiling) water, about half a cup or so. Meanwhile, finely chop the white mushrooms and sprinkle with lemon juice, this adds to the flavor later. Dice the onion. Melt the butter in a large pan, and sauté the onion until soft, add the mushrooms and stir for 8-10 minutes, sprinkling with the Provencal herb blend. Add cream and stock and dried porcini with soaking liquid (maybe you need o strain this first, the porcini I use are clean enough to skip this step), bring to a boil and simmer for 15 minutes.

Let cool, and puree the soup in a blender.

Coarsely chop the brown button mushrooms and sauté them lightly in olive oil – they should not soften.

Reheat the soup, stir in the cream cheese. Serve and ladle brown mushrooms into each serving, top with chopped parsley or chervil.

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Tags: gluten-free, low-carb, mushrooms, No Croutons Required, soups