Me: “When you add baking soda it speeds up the Maillard reaction! So you get this browned, caramelized, super rich carrot flavour!”
My chef friend: “Uhuh.”
Me: “But don’t you see how cool that is? You know when you brown duck confit or sear fish and it gets that great texture from the crispy skin and all the fat softens and turns into a sauce? It’s like that but with carrots!”
Chef friend: “We make this bread in the pressure cooker that’s light and…” (I tune out, as I’m distracted by the wonders of carrots, which he is not talking about at this moment)
Me: (distractedly) “Uhuh. That sounds good.”
Chef friend: “And then this really cool thing happens where the baking soda in the pressure cooker increases the pH.”
Me: (I perk up) “That’s just like the carrot soup! Except the carrots get all caramelized and delicious and intense….Oh. You were making fun of me.”
So I got a little excited about this soup. I first tried it at the Modernist Cuisine Cooking Lab in Bellevue, Washington at the good-bye dinner for head chef, Maxime Bilet. They served it with a coconut milk foam and deep-fried curry leaves. But the soup doesn’t need any garnish, and there are much easier ones than that if you insist it does. At its heart it’s a 5-ingredient recipe (3 if you don’t count and salt and pepper; 6 if you do and you don’t have a juicer). Couldn’t be simpler.
And it couldn’t be more stunning.
Did you read that part above above how cool it is that when you add baking soda to a pressure cooker it increases the pH of the cooker’s contents and speeds up the Maillard reaction – the browning reaction of foods that adds a caramelized note? So the butter browns, the carrots brown, and the soup is like buttery, caramel-y heaven. There are a bunch of versions of the recipe online, but I went with the Food & Wine verion because I like their testers and it’s less fussy than the Modernist Cuisine version. the quantities also vary a lot, so stick with this one to be safe. I borrowed a juicer to make this recipe, and it was worth it, but you can also buy carrot juice at big grocery stores and some health food stores. You need about two bags of carrots. And don’t worry about the small amount of liquid in the pressure cooker. It’s supposed to be that way. It’s also supposed to have a lot of butter. I used a vegan butter, but I didn’t skimp because I figured that could cause the carrots to burn in the pressure cooker. You do not eat this soup in one sitting. You serve small amounts and savour every intensely flavoured sip.
Then you, too, can rave about the wonders of baking soda and pressure cookers.
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