Pinching Pennies With Thomas Keller and Charlie Trotter

My wife ate lunch several days a week at the Trotter's To Go downtown before it closed last week. What, did she inherit money? Nope, she ate soup, the one thing that seemed relatively economical there. But now it's closed and so it has fallen to me to attempt to replicate Trotter's To Go's soups in little plastic containers for her to take to work. Consequently, she's been bringing me soup from there to taste and attempt to retro-engineer.

One of her favorites was curried sweet potato soup. I tasted it and, well, it pretty much tasted like sweet potatoes, a nice yellow curry powder, and a little cream. But I suspected, it being Trotter's, that there were hidden depths in it, specifically a top-quality vegetable broth. This was a bit problematic for me, since I've pretty much never made soup without a carcass in it, in fact, my idea of soup is pretty much, take a bone, add water.

Poking around the web I found that Thomas Keller had a recipe for vegetable broth, which seemed as close as I was likely to get to Charlie himself, in The French Laundry Cookbook (which I look at from time to time, it's very beautiful and thoughtful, but generally find hopeless to cook from). Now, coming from Keller, the recipe was very particular about what should go in vegetable broth to produce something clear and beautiful. Yes to fennel, carrots and leeks, no to celery (gets bitter), no to salt and pepper (save for the final dish), no to the random scraps that cloud up flavor (says he), yes to straining and straining till it's perfectly clear.

So I started out with the Keller-approved vegetables:



Just 45 minutes later, I strained it and then put the sweet potatoes in the broth:



Now, making a Keller-level broth right there pretty much killed the economic value of making your own soup, what with those leeks and that fennel bulb and so on. There's probably $12 worth of vegetables at Whole Foods prices there, before we ever get to adding sweet potatoes to it. But I figured, throw in some more of the scraps Keller wouldn't approve of and I could get a second batch out of those same vegetables. So, after reducing both the remaining pint or so of the first broth and the quart or so of the second broth to fit in my freezer, I ended up with another little jar of very clean and flavorful Keller-approved broth concentrate, and a slightly larger one of, if truth be told, pretty much indistinguishable Keller-plus-scraps broth concentrate, which will make a nice base for my next batch. The cost per unit is at least a little better now.



This is either right after adding milk, or the opening credits of a Roger Corman picture:



Not exactly the way Charlie makes it— I think this recipe I used for guidance adds more milk than he does— but not bad, not bad at all. I got one good dinner for the whole family, and three pint containers to freeze. A good start. Thanks, Tom and Chuck, for helping me stretch that household budget!

I've always wondered why leeks and fennel and shallots are so all-fired expensive at chain grocery stores, and are about 1/10 the price at independants like Marketplace on Oakton. Anybody know?

The soup looks delish, Mike - all it needs in my book is a couple of ham hocks.

"I've always wondered why leeks and fennel and shallots are so all-fired expensive at chain grocery stores, and are about 1/10 the price at independants like Marketplace on Oakton. Anybody know?"

I think the answer is simply demand, turnover or what have you. Marketplace on Oakton and others like it have a very multiethnic customer base that actually cooks their meals from scratch (using "european" ingredients like leeks, fennel, shallots, fresh herbs, etc.). They sell more of these things faster, so there's less waste, and the prices are correspondingly lower. Jewel probably throws away more fennel than it sells.

You would think that Whole Foods has customers who demand leeks and fennel. I suppose the Jewel on Howard that serves mostly the same customer base as Marketplace can't change it's prices because they are standardized for the chain? Oh, well...

I think Whole Foods sells plenty of leeks and fennel, I think their rent is a lot more than, say, Tony's or A&G, also their overall basis for pricing has been rumored to be kinda high.

But I think next time I want to make a lot of vegetable stock for these endeavors, I'm going to hit somewhere like A&G and then make a LOT of vegetable stock.

I have vegetable stock, turkey stock (from T-day) and veal stock in my freezer, and I have to say, it's a wonderful thing to be able to just grab a bottle of instant deep flavor for any soup or braise you're making. As a habit, I recommend it.

Agreed. I will have to follow your tutorial for vegetable stock - I've never made it, but I regularly save bones to make stock. This weekend, I tried using a cornish hen to make stock, and it worked beautifully - perhaps better than a whole regular-size chicken. I have a dedicated set of ice-cube trays for what Sparky terms "soup ice cubes," which then are bagged in the freezer. Waaay better than canned. Light-years better than the bouillon cubes my Mom used.