Leek and potato soup
In which I ramble on about my favourite chunky soup
Ingredients
medium leeks*1
4 medium potatoes*2
1 litre of milk*3
soft stock cube*4
hard stock cube*5
garlic granules
dried dill
ground pepper*6
3 or 4 heaped tablespoons plain flour*7
oil*8
Method
This is a chunky soup designed to be served hot. The more traditional recipes blend it into a paste; if you're doing that, cut everything much, much finer than I'm suggesting. Served cold, this soup is disgusting, so don't.
Put a tablespoon of oil into a pan you can cover that will hold about 4 litres (the soup will be about 2½ litres when done, but you will be grateful of the space). Drop in your soft stock cube.
Wash your leeks on general principles. Slice the root off and discard, then slice the rest into "coins" about the width of your thumb.*9
Drop them in to your pan, then put some ground garlic on top — I like lots (two heaped teaspoons) but it's your soup, do as you wish. Add your dill (one flat teaspoon, something like that, it's just to lift the broth, not flavour it), and then your ground pepper (soups should make your nose run, which is what the pepper is for; ¾ of a teaspoon? "A very good dash"? Something like that). Stir to mix everything up and coat the leeks.
Put the heat on under your leek pan.*10 Slow, say about setting "2", you know your stove, "slow" is what you're wanting.
Peel your potatoes.
Stir your leeks.
Slice the potatoes in half, then in half again, then again etc until you've got lumps about the size of your leek slices.
Stir your leeks.
You've seen chefs do the potato halving on TV in their hands. Don't be ridiculous, do it on a chopping board.*11
Stir your leeks.
A tablespoon at a time, add your flour. From the second time you do this, you'll know how it works and will just dump it all in. That's fine too.
Stir it all around until the leeks are all coated. This isn't to do with taste, it's to do with giving enough time for the gluten in the flour to activate but not enough time for it to burn.
Add a large splash of your milk and stir it in.*12 It should immediately start forming a paste. Add more milk. Stir, and the paste will thicken again. If you're feeling nervous, keep adding it at this rate. If you're confident, pour the lot in.
Keep stirring either way.
All set? Drop your potatoes in now.
Everything should be covered by the milk. If it isn't, you can add more milk, although at this point not-ice-cold water will do. By 'covered', I don't mean 'drowned', by the way. Enough liquid that the veg is poking out rather than invisible, but also that you can see the liquid itself for the veg. See the picture.
Give it all a good stir again and go and look at social media for 5 minutes. Is it burning? Then your heat is far too high. Turn it down a lot. Is it doing nothing? We're on course, assuming the heat is actually on.
Give it a good stir and go and look at social media for 10 minutes. Is it burning? Then why the hell didn't you turn it down more? Is it occasionally bubbling? That's good. Is it doing nothing? Check the heat is actually on, but, yeah, that's fine too.
Give it a good stir and go and look at social media for 10 minutes. Is it burning? What the hell is wrong with you, I told you to turn the heat down. Is it bubbling? We're there! Is it doing nothing? Okay, just this once turn the heat up a bit. And check that it's actually on.
Give it a good stir and cover the pan.*13
Reduce the heat to the bare minimum. If you're cooking with gas, a diffuser on the smallest burner is really helpful, otherwise the hot spot will burn. I have this one*14 but you can always just set a reminder to come back every 10-20 minutes and give it a stir.
The soup is ready when the potato is cooked. In other leek recipes you need to watch the leeks because undercooked leeks will have everybody farting sparks for 36 hours. But if the potatoes are done, so are the leeks.
I'd say allow an hour of cooking on the lowest heat, but the longer the better.
What I've been doing of late is getting it to the point where I'm reducing the heat to the minimum and pouring the soup into a slow cooker.*15 No chance of burning, no diffuser needed, just leave it for 2-4 hours. At max, on the 'low' setting, 12 hours works too.*16
Leftovers
This soup freezes well, but needs to be defrosted slowly. Let it go cold, stir, and put it into recycled British-Chinese food takeaway tubs.*17 Label the tubs. No, I know you'll remember, but nevertheless, label them. Contents and today's day. Yes, you'll definitely remember, but label them anyway. I'd say 3 months for "best before" and 6 to 9 months for "this has got too bland to eat" in a deep freeze. That scales to the same amount of time but in days for the ice cream compartment of a fridge.
If you're just refrigerating the leftovers, I'd go for 3 days in the fridge if you've used dairy (milk, cream or butter) while cooking, and 5 days if not. The sniff test will tell you.
For reheating from frozen, the best results are always to defrost the container in the fridge for 24 hours, or on the side in the kitchen for 6 hours. If you're wanting it NOW, then you'll be used to how badly microwaves defrost things even with their famed technical defrost settings.
Once defrosted, or straight out of the fridge, the stove is always the least work. But the microwave seems easier, so: crack the lid, 1½ minutes on high, stir, 1½ on high, stir. If it's not steaming, another 30 to 60 seconds and stir. If there was dairy in the soup, you might consider reducing the time and increasing the number of stirs just to avoid stuff boiling over.
Sex
This doesn't seem the sexiest meal in the world. For that we seem to want stuff to be alive*18 or to have been painfully boiled alive,*19 which is a true turn-on, I'm sure we can all agree.
But this recipe, beyond any and all of my go-to recipes, is the one that has got me the most sex. Of course, by the time you've got the guy home for a meal you're cooking for him, odds are that he's already up for doing you. But this one, warm and filling and soothing and almost always offering seconds... it just works. Buggery*20 follows every time.
- ==2 large ones or 5 small ones ↩
- ==2 large ones; we're peeling them so small ones are more trouble than they're worth. Maris Pipers are great, red skinned work too, but these are sitting in milk for a couple of hours, any type will be fine, including cheap baking potatoes ↩
- skimmed (US: 1%) is fine, but consider adding 250ml+ of double cream to make it into Gold Top. Or just use Gold Top. For vegans, pea protein milk is good to cook with ↩
- Knorr, for instance, the type you can't crumble into a pint of water ↩
- optional, depends on your taste. This adds extra hidden salt, so be aware. Vegetable cube is best, chicken second. If the broth tastes fine but "shallow", you might be better off just adding salt directly ↩
- finely ground is best, so pre-ground is my choice. Coarser ones remain gritty. For aesthetics, white pepper is better than black ↩
- cœliacs: cornflour works, but the soup will be a bit thin. You might do better with almond flour, which also works for people on a keto diet who are pretending potato doesn't count, although I can still taste the almond and it's not really welcome ↩
- a couple of tablespoons of neutral oil, rapeseed or sunflower; olive oil works too. The original recipe uses butter, about 30g (ie, an ounce) and that really enhances things, but, you know, saturated fat and stuff ↩
- when you get to the green part, you'll start noting gritty bits in the leaves. It's fine to stop there and discard the rest, but you can always wash the grit out. Give up when you come to the parts where the leaves have dried out, this bit tastes of wood and will never get tender ↩
- gas hobs: use the middle-size burner for now. You may need to juggle on to the smallest later, or move to the largest on one of those days where the calorific value of the gas seems to have declined to 'faintly flammable air', but you'll already be used to this ↩
- my mum does this. She also breaks eggs into a bowl with one hand. I get it, mum, you have qualifications in this that you later used in award-winning kitchens. I do not. Neither do you, gentle reader. Don't ↩
- Here's where you put the double cream in if you're using it, diluting it with milk from here onwards ↩
- you cover a pan to stop things thickening (aka reducing). You leave the lid off when you want stuff to thicken. For soups, you want them to be free-flowing liquids, so the steam needs to condense back into the broth. For sauces, we want them to be thick and lovely and thick, so we leave the lid off. If you were turning this into a leek and potato pie, you'd leave the lid off. Also: consider making a leek and potato pie ↩
- AFFILIATE LINK. If you buy it from Jeffy's Slave Labour Emporium, I'll get 65p! Eventually ↩
- AFFILIATE LINK. Again, to Jeffy's Super Yacht Fund Dystopia, but this time I'll make £1.25 in the full passage of time ↩
- Beyond 6 hours, even a slow cooker on low will start burning stuff at the edges. You'll need to start reminding yourself to stir it every hour. Alternatively, switch it off entirely and come back sometime in the next 24 hours to put it back on (2 hours on high, 4 hours on low) before you want to eat ↩
- AFFILIATE LINK. 70p this time. Thanks Jeffy ↩
- I have heard the arguments about oysters and I'm not playing this game ↩
- there is no 'humane' way of killing any creature, but boiling alive or freezing to death lobsters are both horrific. Smashing their heads in with a hammer? Christ. And you particularly picked that one out of a tank of tortured animals for it to be specifically tortured to death for you? ↩
- other sexual practices are available ↩
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