Читать книгу The First-Time Cook - Sophie Grigson, Sophie Grigson - Страница 33

If you like smooth soups, then you will need to invest in some type of liquidiser. Jug liquidisers are surprisingly cheap and make a far smoother soup than a processor, which is far more expensive anyway. Hand-held wand liquidisers are also a bargain. Although it takes longer to liquidise a saucepanful of soup, you have a greater degree of control, so that if you wish you can vary the texture from rough and chunky to silky smooth.

Before liquidising, let the soup cool a little, so that odd splashes won’t burn you. With a jug liquidiser, always make sure that the lid is firmly clamped on. Don’t over-fill – it is better to liquidise the soup in three or four batches, than to risk it squirting out all over the kitchen.

Even the toughest liquidiser can’t reduce absolutely everything to a smooth cream, so every now and then you will come across a soup that also needs sieving (such as the roast tomato and onion soup on page 24). The trick here is to make sure that you have a sieve with a comparatively loose mesh, i.e. with big enough holes to make sieving bearable. A sieve with a very tight mesh is fine for, say, sifting flour, but a nightmare when it comes to soups and sauces, as you have to work really, really hard for relatively small returns. So, go check your sieves and if necessary invest in a new, wide-meshed one as soon as possible. With that in hand, sieving a soup should be an easy enough matter. Use the largest wooden spoon you own to push the solids through the mesh of the sieve, scraping the puréed matter that clings to the underside off into the rest of the soup fairly frequently.

Alternatively, you could buy a mouli-légumes, or a food mill, which will do a similar job with efficiency.