Corn velouté soup (from my cookbook)

Welcome back everybody! So today we're going to be sharing a recipe from our cookbook here, French Cooking Academy, 100 essential recipes for the home cook and it is a soup or should I say a veloute. Now soup is this thing that you want to make a lot of time but you don't know how to approach it. So in my book I've got one technique I'm using to make a veloute of vegetables. We're going to be using the beloved corn here because this is easy. If you're lazy, you don't have time, you can't be bothered, this is going to be the soup for you and not only you're going to be able to make that one but you can also replace the corn with something else and make all kinds of veloute soup. Let me show you how the process works. So let's learn how to make that corn veloute. Now you may wonder what on earth is a veloute. In French cooking it's very simple, there's different types of soup. We don't use the word just it's a soup. Okay so we've got the potage. The potage is like the thin soup like your vegetable soup, very watery. Okay that's one type and then we've got another type here which is called the veloute which is based on a béchamel sauce. The béchamel sauce is also called the white sauce and this is the stuff you use in your lasagna, your moussaka and you're going to be saying oh my god this is very thick how we're going to be using this. Well in French cooking you can make your béchamel with a different thickness. Okay there's basically three types of white sauce that we use. The very thin one which is the one we're going to be using here, you can use it for soups and veloute and stuff like that or even sauces. Then you're going to have the standard one that you're going to be using for your moussaka, your lasagna, whatever anything like this and then you get a very thick one that is used to make souffle. You make a cheese souffle or anything like this you're going to have a very thick béchamel and use that technique you will see once you try it there is no turning back. All right so let's begin. So remember there's two components to that veloute. First the béchamel and then the puree of vegetable. We can't do anything more simpler than that. How do we make that famous white sauce aka béchamel? Very simple. First we need to make a roux. Okay a roux is an equal amount of butter and flour. So the first thing we're going to do is take a pan. I'm going to put this on medium. I'm going to melt my butter first. As soon as the butter is melted make sure you reduce your heat a bit when you can keep it too low. We're going to add all the flour at once and we're going to mix everything to form some kind of a paste. Once you've got your paste on here you've created something that is called the roux. The roux is the thickening agent that is used to make any type of white sauce okay béchamel and the amount of flour and butter you use in there is going to dictate how thick your béchamel is going to become. It's always typically based on a liter of milk okay. So from here we're going to leave this to cook for about two minutes. Put a timer on low heat. The time is up. My roux has been bubbling away on very low heat. I've now turned my heat off and I'm going to put this totally off the heat and let it cool down completely. If you want to accelerate the process you can put the bottom of the pan and using a bit of water but we're not in a hurry. So I'm going to just put this on the side and then we're going to warm up the milk. Now when it comes to the milk I always like to flavor the milk when I'm making a béchamel because if you're someone that had a white sauce and you don't like it because it was like a tasteless kind of sauce the reason for that is because your milk is not flavored. The flavor starts here. So this is the full creaming as I've got some fresh cream floating around here and what I'm doing but flavoring I'm adding some stuff. So here I've got a bit of thyme. I've got some cloves, some garlic and I'm going to put as well lots of little shallots here. So as you can see I've got all my ingredients floating around. I'm going to add a tad of salt in here and we're going to warm this up while the roux is cooling down. As soon as your milk starts to simmer and start to smoke like this it's enough. We're going to turn the heat off and I'm going to mix this into our roux. So here we are that was the roux that we made before. As you can see now it's cooled down. It's a bit of a thick paste and from here what we're going to do is start pouring the milk over. So I'm going to filter it using a sieve. I'm going to put roughly a half of it first and using a whisk I'm going to incorporate everything. So you do this with that half to make sure you capture all the in the roux. It's a bit cold like a paste so you want to make sure and you whisk the side and everything and you capture all the stuff in and from here then you continue. We're going to take the rest of the milk and pour it over and mix everything together. Now little reminder I'm doing that step here with the heat off. Okay once this is done I'm going to now turn my heat back to medium and we're going to bring that milk with the roux to the boil in order to make that thin béchamel and you're going to have to whisk from time to time to make sure it doesn't stick and be patient. Just use a medium heat. If you go too fast it might start sticking at the bottom and everything like that. So medium heat and taking your time is key. Right you can see this that's the bubbles you want. When that happens two minutes maximum. After two minutes you turn your heat off and you should have that thin consistency that thin béchamel that can coat a spoon nicely like this. You want to taste the preparation it should be tasting already good. Okay not too much salt, light flavored but flavorsome. Yeah perfect. So now we're going to add the corn. So the heat is now off. Now for the corn it's really up to you. I'm using a maximum of two cans of 400 grams. This is the first can that's in and it depends on how strong you want your soup to be. If you want it really yellow with a strong taste of corn add more corn. If you want just the one can it's fine as well. So for me what I've done I'm using kind of one and a half kind of at 600 grams and I keep a few tablespoon of corn for decoration after. And what we're going to do is to mix everything together first and then we're going to use an immersion blender and blitz the whole thing because if you leave it like this as you can see not great. Okay perfect. So immersion blender you've seen this before. Okay and there we go. Blitz the whole thing. All right all done. So as you can see now my velouté is nice and yellow. It's got a nice appetizing corn color compared to what we had before. And let's remind us we now have done the two things. We've done the thin béchamel and we've now mixed the vegetable element and this is ready. It is very thick and coarse. What we're going to do we're going to filter the whole lot. Now filtering the velouté is really what makes the whole thing really nice and smooth and there's no bits of corns and skins everywhere. I'm using a good looking pan. If you want to use the pan you've used for the milk it's fine it's not a problem. Using a sieve in here and I'm going to be passing the whole thing through. Okay you can take a spoon and very slowly move the things like that until it's all passed through. Now when you finish with the the passing you will be left with this. You see that's all the pulp. You don't want this into your velouté. Okay very important so you can press down but you're going to discard this. I'm going to keep on going put more of my of my velouté mix and pass everything through. Now let's look at the result of what you've made. Okay so we had the we've mixed the corn, we've blitzed it, we've passed it through and now we've got a velouté, a corn velouté. So this is the consistency. It is still a little bit on the thick side and this is where the cream comes in. So we're going to be putting the heat back on to medium to warm this up again and we're going to add either cream or milk. If you don't like to have more fat or more cream and stuff like that you can use milk instead but usually about 50 or 100 ml of cream is going to read just adjust the consistency. If you like it like this you know nice and thick it's up to you. You can stop here and you can see the color very important. It's a nice yellowish color but it's not too pronounced. I could have used more corn if I wanted to and that really depends on you. It's going to it's going to be to suit your personal taste but for the time being let's warm this up. This is now on its way. I'm going to reduce the heat and now comes the time for the final touches. You can always add some little tuning into your preparation at the end. This is something I always teach in our school and to all the students. So first we're going to add, I'm going to start with just one or two tablespoons of cream. Okay it's going to mix in and remember that corn is sweet. So I'm going to add, I'm going to count on that as a sweetness with a little salt in here. Okay very important and you've noticed I didn't add any pepper because I've now discovered that you know Cameroon it's a white penja white pepper freshly ground from Cameroon from Africa. It's beautiful and it's really kind of heat you know it's got a very specific taste very woody beautiful always you know love it with all kinds of these white soups like this. It goes a very long way. From here of course we have to taste make sure you get just the right soup you want. All right. So you see not too much cream to not change the color. I can still feel the sweetness slightly but I think it's nicely balanced. I think I'm going to add some more pepper. Okay let's go let's mix that in. I'm going to be done. And now the velouté, the corn velouté is now finished. Look at this consistency. This is the color, the texture, it is balanced, it is delicious and you've now made a velouté the way it is made in a restaurant. And this is the kinds of things I've got throughout my book. These are all the things you're going to be learning. Simple recipes that use this proper technique and that really delivers on taste. Now let's do some serving. And here we are the table is served. So for the serving you can use bowls, you can use plate. I typically kind of like to use your plate in here. Just make sure the soup or sorry the velouté should I say is nice and warm. Very important. So you can see that consistency of the velouté typical as you can see it's nice and thick. You can have it thinner if you want. Okay and from here it's up to you. You can decorate so the you know the final touch and you can have a bit of flavor, a bit of pepper in here. You can have some chives, a bit of color. I think the green you know kind of green and yellow. And these corns remember I've left some of these corns on here because I kind of like to kind of give an extra an extra bite of corns in there. But it's really up to you. But in essence that's about it. This is how you make a delicious corn velouté from scratch. And trust me once you try it you're never gonna do any other corn soup. Okay but that completes the video for this week. I hope you're enjoying. You'll find all the information you need in the video description for the recipe, the courses etc. I will see you next week for another video on the French Cooking Academy. Take care. Bye-bye.