Cream of Fresh Morel Mushroom Soup

Happy peak morel season, or maybe it's past for you if you're south of Minnesota. I've had a lot of requests over the years for a simple fresh cream of morel soup, so this is how I make mine. First we get to go over harvesting and processing because it's never a bad time for a refresher on that. I'm not going to get into cut versus pull, but I cut my morels mostly because I like to leave, you see that small little round stem in the ground? I call that the cheerio of sadness. And I like to leave that to deter other hunters so they know that I got every single mushroom like that. Then when I'm cleaning the mushrooms, I use a sink full of water or a bowl and we just swish the mushrooms. Obviously if they're larger you can cut them up. This is if I'm going to serve the mushrooms whole, but this is a good recipe for those larger, you know, big pigs that you find at end of the season. Now for cutting the mushrooms up, you could cut them smaller. You can see these are a little bit older. That's totally fine. And that's good because those big ones, they're hard to cut. They're hard to fit into your mouth because they're so big, so you have to cut them anyway. Where those smaller ones, I might want to cook those whole because I love how the inside catches the juices that they're cooking with and it's just the perfect vehicle for butter. But you can see I'm just cutting these into bite-sized pieces basically. You go a little bit smaller. I wouldn't go much larger. You could finely chop them. There are lots of different ways to do this, but I want to I want the texture, so I leave them a little bit larger. Now we have a white mirepoix. This is carrot or not carrot, definitely not carrot. Celery, onion, leek. And the key here is to cook this down. You can see these are in small dice too. We don't want big chunks of vegetables. Just a little pinch of thyme. It's kind of optional. It will add the morels. But the big key here is cooking those vegetables down slowly. This is all in like medium heat. This should take like a good 25 minutes. You need to cook the vegetables until they are tender because we're not going to sit here and simmer the soup for a long time after we have added the dairy. Now we add flour. Mix that all around. And we had a decent amount of flour here because it's really the only binder in this soup. A little bit of wine. Flour is going to absorb that. It's going to get kind of sticky there. Just fine. Now we add the chicken stock a little bit at a time. And like I said, we're just cooking this on like medium heat. Slowly, slowly cooking those morels down. A little bit more stock. This is homemade chicken stock. That is going to give you the best flavor. You could use dried morel stock, I guess too. And we're going to simmer this. This is boiling a little bit hard because these small burgers that I cook on, they're just so touchy and they basically are like off or turbo. So you want a gentle bubble, right? Then at the end, we add the cream. We're not going to really simmer it with the cream. We don't want to break that emulsion. You can simmer it really gently and it is going to, it's going to tighten up a lot. It's going to be much better the next day after it sits. And then what I add that some people don't is, I'm from Minnesota. You know, we have wild rice here and morels are a state mushroom. A little bit of good wild rice. Manuman toasted parched wild rice. I'll put a link to my favorite brand in the video description. That's it. Simple, creamy, rich as all get out cream of fresh morel soup. Recipes on my website. There's a link at the top of the video description for that. Thanks for watching.