Hearty leek and potato soup

File this recipe under things the Raguseas actually cook for themselves in real life. This leek and potato soup is one of our rainy weather favorites. Don't call it vichyssoise. The classic French leek and potato soup looks beautiful and tastes unremarkable, in my opinion. This soup looks disgusting and tastes fantastic. You don't have to start with a few ounces of hard salami like I do. You could skip it or use bacon or another fatty cured meat. I like to buy a whole hard sausage so that I can cut it up into really big, chewy chunks. I'm gonna partially puree the soup, so not all the pieces will be this big in the end. In those go to my cold, dry soup pot. As it heats up, enough fat will render out of the salami to cook itself. I want to get those browned. While I wait, I've got a pound and a half of leeks to deal with. 680 grams, but this is not exact science. I'll bisect that lengthwise, and the thing about leeks is that they are, like so many of us, dirty on the inside. Normally, I would bisect it and then rinse out the layers under running water, but I have a lot of leeks to clean here, so today I think I'm just gonna cut all these up first and dump the pieces into a big bowl. Cut off the roots, slice up the middle so that all of the layers will fall apart from each other, and then slice crosswise into little strips. For classical vichyssoise, for cosmetic reasons, you would only use the white parts that grew under the soil. I don't want to waste all of this green part, so I'm gonna keep going up until I get to the really dry and fibrous parts on the top. Why bother with leeks? Why not just use little green onions instead? Well, you could. Green onions also have dirt between their layers. We just usually don't notice because they're smaller. You could use a normal ball bunion, but leeks do have this particular leeky flavor that people prize for a reason. I'm not sure what it is, chemically, but leeks have this mild sweetness that really shines through in something subtly flavored, like a potato soup. So now I will swish these pieces around in water to knock off the dirt and the sand, and then I will fill the bowl up with a lot of excess water. Take it back over to the pot, and now I can just lift the pieces straight up and out and into the pot on top of the now-browned salami. Check it, all of the sand has settled to the bottom, and it's better to dump that outside anyway rather than sending it down the sink. Could mess with your garbage disposal. Stir all that up and get the leeks softening. Classically, you would use gentle heat and not brown anything, but I like to let these brown a little bit. I've got a roughly equal quantity of potatoes here. You could use any kind of potato, but I think flowery potatoes give the soup a slightly granular texture, so I use waxy. And if I were just cooking this for myself, I would not bother peeling them. But Lauren thinks the skins are kinda slimy in the context of a soup, and she's probably right. I usually cut them like french fries, and then I clank across the fries into chunks. Again, I'm gonna half-puree this, so most of these chunks will end up smaller still, but Lauren likes to have at least a few big chunks in the final soup. Dump those in with the leeks and stir them in. If you cook them dry like this for a few minutes, that just accelerates the process, gets them softer a little bit faster. When everything has gotten a good head start, it's time to pour in water or stock — this is chicken stock — and I just barely cover the solids. If I want a looser texture, I can always add more liquid later. I can never take it away, and Lauren likes this soup really thick. Bring that to a spirited simmer, and especially if you're being conservative with your stock, like me, you'll want to cover the pot so that the water doesn't all evaporate, in which case everything would burn. That should keep us safe, just as I'm safer on the internet with Surfshark, sponsor of this video. Actually, a virtual private network like Surfshark has uses far beyond safety and security. A lot of my favorite cooking shows are not available for streaming in the United States, so I just route my internet connection through a secure Surfshark server in a different country where the content is available. They have servers just about everywhere you can imagine, and multiple options for popular countries. If a content provider says, sorry, denied, you're using a VPN, well, just try a different server. A different one has always worked for me, every time. Going through a VPN allows you to evade internet censorship, and it's especially valuable for your data security if you're on public WiFi. Plus, a Surfshark membership comes with Surfshark Alert, which can let you know if any of your passwords and such are compromised. You get Surfshark antivirus and the anonymous Surfshark search tool, and so much more. Best part is you can get Surfshark for 83% off with my link and code in the description. 83% off Surfshark plus three months free if you enter promo code ADAMRAGUSEA, all one word. Thank you, Surfshark. After 20 or 30 minutes of simmering, the potato chunks are fork tender, which is cooked enough. The last major ingredient is gonna be some cream. Maybe about a cup. I don't know, I just go by the color. It's generally safer to put in cream toward the end of cooking. If it gets too hot, the casein proteins squeeze too tight, they curdle, they get all gritty, and the dairy fat separates out and you lose that thick, natural emulsion. However, you do want to bring the cream up to a gentle simmer for a few minutes. You want to denature the casein a little, until you can see the broth noticeably thicken, just a bit. The value of cream, apart from its flavor, is that velvety texture that it brings to soups, and you have to cook it a little to achieve that. I'm gonna turn the heat off now, just to be safe. Vichyssoise is classically pureed, totally smooth. You don't have to puree your soup at all. I like to whiz it up like halfway, and immersion blenders are really good for that, because they give you so much control. But this is one of many reasons why it's helpful to make soup in a tall, narrow pot. If the fluid level was too low, I wouldn't be able to keep the blade submerged and I would be spraying soup everywhere. I just want to bust the potatoes up just enough that I get a really thick soup, but there's still lots of intact chunks in there to bite through. That looks about right. Time to season. I'm sure that they would use white pepper for vichyssoise to keep the color pure, but obviously I can't be bothered. I'll probably only need a pinch of salt, because the stock and the salami were already pretty salty. Stir that up and have a taste. Tastes about right, but it could use some freshening. This is why the kitchen gods gave us fresh herbs. Rosemary is great in wintry dishes, and it's much easier to cut with a knife, but I already washed my cutting board, so scissors. And then I'll pick a few sprigs of thyme — another woody, resinous, wintery herb. If you pair rosemary with thyme, it helps to keep the rosemary from making things taste like a pine tree. Stir those in and that's it. I know that it looks semi-digested, but remember that cooking, in essence, is the act of pre-digesting your food outside your body. Hey, it's gotten humanity this far. Nice big chunks in there to bite through. I especially love the chewy chunks of brown salami. And you know, there are some things I've cooked for a video on this channel that were beautiful, but I never made them ever again. This one I make off-camera all the time, so take that for what it's worth.