Johnny Umami Soup
 | Author:
Eileen Clarke - Rifles and Recipes
Author: Rifles and Recipes |
Johnny Umami Soup Eileen Clarke - Rifles and Recipes Serves 4
Let’s start with Johnny—he’s my husband—then move on quickly to umami. Umami is one of the 5 flavors humans are capable of tasting: sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami. The first four are self-explanatory. Umami is beef, soy sauce, Parmesan cheese, you get the gist. We all favor one or two of the flavors. Personally, I’m heavy into sweet and salt. And, obviously, Johnny is umami, thus the name of this soup. PS: I like to start this soup with a skillet and a Dutch oven. Oh, and all but the fresh marjoram & Madeira can be found at Bob’s Thriftway. If you don’t have fresh marjoram, the usual substitution is for a third less dried leaf: so 1 tablespoon. Bob’s has that too. (The Madeira is at Townsend Drug.)
3 cups water
2 tablespoons turkey or chicken BTB base
3-4 tablespoons oil
1 pound chopped venison
11 ounces (2 ½ to 3 cups) sliced portobello mushrooms
1 ½ to 2 yellow onions, chopped (about 2 1/2 cups)
½ cup Madeira
3/8 teaspoon coarse ground black pepper
Several sprigs of marjoram (at least 3 tablespoons fresh)
1. Start the Dutch oven (DO) over high heat. Add the water and BTB. When it comes to a simmer, turn the heat down so it remains at a simmer. At the same time, start a large fry pan over medium-high heat with 2 tablespoons of the oil.
2. When the oil starts to sizzle, brown the meat on both sides in two batches, and transfer each batch to the DO as it is done. Add another tablespoon of oil, and add the onions. Sauté them until soft, not browned, and add them to the DO. Now add a bit more oil and add the sliced mushrooms to the pan. Turn the heat down to medium-low and let the mushrooms darken and soften. (Mushrooms tend to soak up a lot of oil, so add a bit, if needed.)
3. Once the mushrooms are dark and soft, pour the Madeira into a measuring cup and add it to the mushrooms. Raise the heat to medium, and let the Madeira simmer away until you can run a spatula through the mushrooms and not have the liquid back-fill right away. Add that to the DO.
4. Using fresh marjoram? Tie the sprigs together with string and submerge them in the soup. Gently. Add the pepper, cover the DO and bring it to a simmer. Simmer for 30 minutes and serve with hard rolls.
Game Care Notes: This is a quick-cooking soup, so it’s important to use tender meat, which usually means younger animals/brining or marinating, or aging the meat before cutting. Why? All animals have collagen. Lopez-Alt, in The Food Lab, adds that newborn fawns’ and calves’ collagen is ‘soluble’ but as any animal ages, the collagen ‘organizes’ or toughens.
Right now I’m thinking of the bull elk my John took a few years ago. It was several years old, a 7x7. Had lots of time to organize his collagen. He wasn’t as tough as the muskox John took in Nunavut, Canada, but he was not tender. The weather was perfect for aging, at 33-39 degrees and I decided to do an experiment. While the rest of the bull hung in our garage, I trimmed the backstraps, put them in the fridge (a constant 37F, so comparable to the garage) and waited. Every 2-4 days, I cooked a small slice. The result? One week made it more tender; 2 weeks noticeably more tender; 2 1/2 weeks not an appreciable difference. We immediately cut, wrapped and froze the elk.
