The Belgian National Dish: WATERZOIE!

Image by roboppy via Flickr

There are 10 million people in Belgium and probably as many ways to make Waterzoie, the national dish! You can make it with chicken or fish or seafood, but in all cases it will have leeks as its characteristic feature. It really is a leek soup with either chicken or fish floating in it.

Sounds bad? Think again! It really is very, very tasty and remarkably easy to do if you follow my recipe - it can be quite a lot of work if you start from scratch and actually make a broth with bones and vegetables to cook your meat or fish in. We're in the 21st century and I'm not ashamed to confess that I use industrial bouillon cubes...

Another advantage of Waterzoie is that it can be prepared in advance: the perfect dish when you have guests!

So here's the recipe for 4 persons.

Ingredients

2 cups of leeks cut in julienne strips (at least 4 leeks and try to use the white part and not too much of the green)
1/2 cup white onion, likewise cut in strips
1/2 cup celery, also cut in strips
1 whole breast chicken, leave it whole or cut in two halves,   Alternative: fish or seafood 
1 or 2 bouillon cubes (chicken broth for chicken of course, and fish broth for fish, natch!
1 cup cream (since I live in Italy I use Mascarpone, but normal cream is fine and is what's used in Belgium)
1 egg yolk
Juice of 1/2 lemon (or more as needed - it has to have a sharp "tang")
Butter: one tablespoon
Flour to thicken the sauce (about one tablespoonful of flour plus one of cornflour - maizena - but you will need to adjust to the quantity of broth you have)

Boiled potatoes to accompany

Method

Boil the potatoes and while they're boiling prepare the waterzoie.

1. Cut all the vegetables, leeks, onion and celery,  in thin strips - julienne - about 1/2 inch long. Put in a wide pot, cover with water, add bouillon cube and a small amount (a tablespoonful) of butter.

2. Simmer, covered, for about 10 minutes taking care the vegetables don't burn - add water if need be.

3. After that time and as the vegetables start looking limp, add over them the chicken breasts and sprinkle a little salt over the meat. Cover and continue to simmer another 20 minutes until cooked. At that point the vegetables should be soft and the chicken cooked throughout and tender.

3a. If you use fish then you have to add it after the vegetables have cooked at least 20 minutes: the fish always cooks fast. How long that will take depends on the kind of fish you have chosen: for example, sea bass filets in my view don't need more than 5 minutes. Same with shrimps. More time is needed for lobster. Everytime, adjust the cooking of your vegetables that will always require 30 minutes to reach the right point of mellowness.

4. Now in a saucepan prepare the basis of your sauce: beat in a tablespoonful of flour and one of cornflour in 2 cups cold water and set on the fire to boil. This is how I make a "roux": I don't start by melting butter and working the flour in it. That's not needed! You can always add the butter - fresh, better for your health - at the end, when the sauce is done! Remember to beat it with a whisk so that the flour mixes well in the water and keep beating when it boils. It should boil at least 5 minutes to ensure the flour is cooked.

5. Pull out the chicken (or fish) from the pot where cooked and set aside on a warm serving dish (cover to keep the meat warm) You will serve the potatoes peeled in the same serving dish.

6. Do the sauce: pour the "roux" mixture from your saucepan (that you did in step 4) into the pot with the vegetables. Adjust the quantity of broth (I like it fairly liquid - but it's up to you, how thick a leek sauce you really want). Add chicken bouillon cube(s) or fish broth as needed so that it is rather strong tasting: it shouldn't be too bland because at this point you add the cream + egg yolk + lemon juice. Adjust with salt, pepper and lemon to taste. Once the yolk is in, be careful if you need to warm it up : you cannot boil the sauce anymore or it will turn stringy on you!

7. To serve: put the sauce (which will be very abundant!) in a soup toureen, and cut the chicken and potatoes for presentation on the serving dish.

This dish should be accompanied by full-bodied red wine if done with chicken - white wine if done with fish.

Enjoy!  You could be eating this in Brussels!

Image via Wikipedia

Chicken Soup Medieval Style

Image via Wikipedia
This is a plain, simple recipe, far away from Nouvelle Cuisine and inspired from an older time than Escoffier and classical cuisine - much older, the Middle Ages actually.

Two years ago, as we spent a couple of weeks in Touraine going around all the various Renaissance castles and gardens, I came across some neat restaurants serving medieval cuisine (or so they pretended!). I was so intrigued that I picked up a couple of cookbooks about medieval cuisine to study it.



Fascinating! Not everything our forefathers ate six hundred years ago is good or in line with contemporary tastes but it's worth digging into.


It would seem that much of medieval cuisine was characterized by a lavish use of meat broths variously done and lots and lots of herbs. And for making sauces, medieval cooks tended to use bread as a thickener rather than wheat flour as we do now. Chinese cuisine of course uses corn flour to thicken gravies - possibly rice flour in older-style recipes - and it would seem natural that Europeans should have used bread, the classic food of Western civilization. Some of them still do, for example the Spaniards when they make Gazpacho which, as everyone knows, is thickened with bread.

By the way, if you try to use bread as a thickener, I've noticed through trial and error that the traditional method for thickening Gazpacho - slices of stale bread soaked in water and then squeezed dry before adding to the vegetable mix - is by far the best. Any short cut you might be tempted to use, such as throwing slices of bread directly in the mix and then reduce everything to a pulp,doesn't give a satisfactory result: your soup or sauce might present itself as thick as you might want it to be, but you'll find it hard to digest. I don't know why, but the step of soaking bread in water and squeezing it dry is somehow essential. Maybe with the water running off, it gets rid of some indigestible elements in the bread (perhaps yeast?), but whatever it is, it makes quite a difference for your internal hydraulics!

Now to my recipe. I use no oil of any kind to cook it - only add a little olive oil at the end when it's done. As to the ingredients, they're very simple: a chicken in pieces (I use only the breast, whole, but you can put in legs or whatever you like) and every fresh vegetable you can find...

It's a little like the Irish Stew in Three Men in a Boat where the dog adds a rat he found floating in the Thames (and that's when you realize half-way through the book that the protagonists are not four but really three men in a boat as in the title - the fourth voice belonging to the dog!). Well, I'm not suggesting you add a rat to it, but it's important to use vegetables that are in season. It's a medieval recipe after all, and they didn't transport exotic produce from abroad. Speaking of exotic produce, that's why potatoes or tomatoes are optionals: medieval cooks probably didn't use them but I do simply because I love them and I am no purist: I'll tweak any recipe to make it better tasting!

Here is the way I did it yesterday (for 3 to 4 persons). I served it lukewarm and it was just the right thing for a summer evening. But it would work equally well in winter if you served it piping hot.


Ingredients:
- 250 g or half-a-pound of chicken meat or more if desired in big pieces (I used breast and cut it in 4 chunks)
- 1 big onion chopped plus 3 or 4 spring onions whole
- 1 leek in chunks
- 1 big carrot scraped and cut in thick slices
- 1 or 2 large potatoes peeled and cubed
- 2 celery stems in chunks
- 4 or 5 big pieces of cauliflower (that's an important medieval type veggie - can be replaced by any sort of cabbage)
- 1 large tomato peeled and cut in 4 pieces or use a handful of cherry tomatoes whole (they're very tasty when cooked and to make it easy to peel, throw them in together with the other veggies without peeling them; let them boil a couple of minutes then fish them out with a slotted spoon; run cold water over them to cool them down and peel off the skin: it comes off very easily; at that point slice them in half and return to the soup)
- 1 zucchini in big chunks
- Some green beans cut in pieces, fresh peas, watercress or spinach leaves or whatever greens you may have at hand (you need a green touch for your eyes...and taste!)
- salt and pepper (instead of salt I use a Knorr cube or you can add consommé or ready-made chicken broth - whatever broth works best for you but not too much of it: remember you've got chicken meat in your soup, and you don't want to smother your chicken!)

To thicken and finish the soup:

- Parsley, lots of it (a handful!)
- 2 Bread slices soaked in water and squeezed dry
- 1 spoonful of wine vinegar (to taste)
- 1 spoonful olive oil (to taste)

Method

This is the big difference with the way one makes Italian Minestrone (where you start off by frying onion in olive oil and then add the vegetables): here, you put all the vegetables together in your pot and you barely cover with cold water. Flavour it with either salt and pepper or broth, but always remember to grind pepper from your pepper mill (the industrial ground variety has little flavour).

Bring to a boil and at that point add the chicken meat making sure it is immediately covered in the boiling liquid and turns white (this prevents the meat juice from escaping and turning the meat dry). Let everything simmer with a lid half on. It will cook very quickly - in about 20 minutes (I like my veggies slightly crisp and in any case chicken meat cooks fast - you don't want to overcook or everything will get stringy and sad-looking).

When it's done, you'll notice you have a soup with little liquid - that's the way it should be and DON'T ADD water! This isn't really a soup - more like a stew and now you need to thicken that liquid. Ladle some of it into your osterizer where you've placed the bread and parsley and switch the machine on, pouring from the top a little vinegar and oil. Taste and see if you like it. It has to have a fresh taste, the way Gazpacho does (it's the vinegar that does it) but not too much.

Then put it back in your pot and swirl it. And don't cook it anymore or you'll lose the fresh flavour of the parsley. Serve it in a deep earthenware dish if you've got one (that makes it look more medieval), taking care to place the pieces of chicken in the middle so people can see them and easily help themselves.

As I said before, if it's summer, don't heat it up: it's very nice at room temperature. And it certainly makes the life of a hostess easier when she's got guests to look after!

P.S. You can experiment with additional herbs other than parsley (for example tarragon). Let me know how it comes out!

P.P.S. Since it's a cross between a soup and a stew, I think a new word should be made up for it: a chicken "stoup" or "stoop"...How does that strike you?

About Fish Soups: the Tricks to Make a Super Soup!

Image via Wikipedia Here are some thoughts on how fish soup is made in European cuisine.

Sounds boring?

No, believe me, it's a fascinating subject. Fish soup is immensely varied across the continent, using as it necessarily does, local ingredients.


Btw, I am excluding here any mention of fish soups made elsewhere around the globe: that would deserve another post.

But consider Europe for a moment. The Russians will make fish soup with cabbage and beetroot, the Belgians with leeks and celery, the Italians with tomato and any number of Mediterranean herbs. Everybody of course makes fish soup with onions and...fish. Plus any seafood available, if they happen to be near the sea.

Don't be discouraged by this tremendous variety. First it's fun! And then, there is some definite aggregation of the data around a few basic models. You have essentially a Northern fish soup and a Southern one - plus possibly an Eastern one. When you need to decide on a recipe to follow, it's useful to keep in mind the differences, so that you don't make a mess of whatever fish soup you're doing.

Because these models don't mix. No tomatoes or olive oil should ever go into a "Northern Soup", and no leeks and cream into a "Southern Soup". The Eastern model is less rigorously defined, but certain mixtures are not allowed even here: for example, never mix butter and olive oil in the same recipe, you either go for the one or the other - that is, if you want to be true to the spirit of that cuisine. If not, feel free to sprinkle chocolate everywhere!

The ingredients going into any of these soups have to do with what is available locally all year round, and especially in the "off-season" (i.e. winter). I suspect that is what historically makes any given recipe different from all others: for centuries, people have been making food with the ingredients they found easily around them, and therefore those particular recipes, so often repeated through the years, became, as it were, the "standard".

Take the Northern Soup: the Belgian fish Waterzoie is an excellent example, based as it is on local produce - leeks, onions, celery and potatoes. Likewise the Southern Soup, whether it is the French Provençal Bouillabaisse or the Italian zuppa di pesce. Both have onion, garlic, tomatoes and no potatoes - which is of course not surprising. Potatoes are a quintessentially northern staple.

So what makes a fish soup really good, whether it is Northern, Southern or Eastern ? Any recipe book worth its name will give you the ingredients and a method to follow. You don't need me for that. Go look for whatever you want on Internet or buy a cookbook in a store. But in order to decide whether to follow a recipe and to be sure the results are going to be good, you need some evaluation criteria. This is where I come in and I wanted to share my experience with you. I follow some general rules in preparing fish soup that I have found over time to give the best results both in terms of flavour and health.


Yes, that's right: health. What's good for your health is important too! A recipe that calls for wallops of cream and glasses of olive oil is to be avoided like the plague: it's guaranteed to make you bloat up! It is a matter of common sense. You can follow the recipe but CUT DOWN on the amount of fat suggested: if it says two tablespoons, use one. And to avoid burning ingredients you don't need all that fat. An easy solution is to use teflon-coated pans, but you know that already, I'm sure.

Something else is useful to cut the amount of fats in fish soup: whenever a recipe suggests you start off by frying chopped onions or grated garlic in oil or butter and then throw the fish pieces in to cook them, DON'T DO IT! This business about starting with fried onions (or whatever mixture of vegetables, such as a mirepoix) is for the birds (and most certainly not for fish!) - and that's also true of vegetable minestrone, by the way. I have found that it is absolutely unnecessary from the standpoint of taste. On the contrary, unless you go very, very light on the amount of onions you use and ensure it only turns translucent and never burns, you risk inflicting a strong, unwelcome taste to your soup: it won't taste fresh! And I would take a step further: too much butter or oil in any recipe, especially if it is fried, coats the ingredients with its own taste, preventing the basic flavour of whatever you're cooking to come through, whether fish, vegetable or meat.


For me, that's a GOLDEN RULE: use as little fat as you can to cook and if possible, add it only at the end, after the cooking is done. A spoonful of fresh, uncooked olive oil goes much further to give taste to you soup if you put it in at the end of the cooking process than if you use a whole glassful at the beginning! Ditto for butter.

So how do I prepare my fish soup? Simple, no frying, just cover with water. Not plain water. You need to add salt and pepper, or better , use fish broth instead of water. Fish broth is easy: nowadays you don't need to make it anymore, it comes in cubes (for example Knorr's) ready to be dissolved in water. And I mean COVER your ingredients - just so. Do not exceed with liquid but make sure your soup doesn't dry out! To do this, there are two ways: either a slow fire and a lid on your pot, or a strong flame and no lid. In the latter case, you have to stick around to make sure nothing burns. That's what I do because it cooks faster, and I don't like to waste time in the kitchen. Plus I can control the degree of doneness of the ingredients.

The degree of doneness? That's crucial to make a good fish soup. Much depends on how fresh your ingredients are and obviously your soup will only be as good as whatever you put in it. The fresher, the better but I'm not telling you anything you don't know. What is important, and not so obvious, is the SEQUENCE in which ingredients are dropped into the boiling pot. Start with the vegetables and make sure they are only HALF-COOKED BEFORE throwing in the fish. That's the key, because fish - even crustaceans, clams, shrimps, calamars and the like - cook very, very fast. If you cook these marine little things too long they curl up and dry on you, they become hard to chew and lose their flavour. Overcooking is the death of any good fish soup (or for that matter of any fish preparation). In my experience, the fish in a fish soup cooks UNDER FIVE MINUTES.

Basically making a fish soup is very easy. You first cook the vegetables that give flavour to your soup in a minimum of salted water, or better still fish broth. When the vegetables are half-way there, you throw in the fish. You bring it all back to boiling and then, after one minute or less, turn it off. Put a lid on it for another five minutes max.


Serve hot with croutons or toasted bread rubbed with garlic if it's a Southern Soup. Or swirl in it half-a-glass of cream with the juice of a half-lemon and one egg yolk beaten into it if it's a Northern Soup. I have no special advice for Estearn Soup except to add at the last minute either Paprika or fennel seed - to taste.

The results of following this procedure? Superlative! Ok, I know I sound like I'm bragging but I'm not. Just ask my family and friends. I've had people who hate fish soup (my own mother is one) literally dig into mine. And a very satisfying result this is for the cook!
If you have cooking tips regarding fish,as I'm sure you do, I would love to hear them, and do let me know if my tips have helped you!

Because, bottom line, I believe the secret of good food is less in the inventiveness of a recipe's ingredients than in following a correct procedure that preserves the original taste of every ingredient. It's more a matter of HOW you do it than of WHAT's in it!