Chilled soup update 2

Chilled soup season is winding down. To catch up on a few from the past month: Jen made a carrot-ginger soup that was quite zippy and full flavored. The only credit I can take for that creation is the mistake of ordering 5 pounds of ginger. If you don’t know now you do, 5 pounds of ginger is a lot of ginger.
Next was a chilled tomato soup. I pureed a small amount of mire poix with the tomatoes and it turned out tasting a lot like a standard gazpacho. Deciding to drizzle it with truffle oil and fresh cracked black pepper made it exciting.

Just for shits and giggles I tried a clarified tomato gelled topped with house cured wild Coho salmon and preserved lemon salad. The back story goes like this; we serve a chopped tomato salad all summer. We sell a whole lot of them, and that is an understatement. In an effort to keep up the pantry chef cuts the tomatoes up at the beginning of service and holds them in a strainer allowing liquid to drain away from them in an effort to not serve soggy tomato pieces as a salad two hours down the road. Well that wonderful elixir had been going down the drain until I rescued it and now it is saved! Hence this soup and it turned out quite well. I made six and sold four over three days. Not too bad.

The flop of the summer goes to a chilled buttermilk soup with cured salmon and dill. The soup base is a classic Polish soup called Cholnik. I’ve written about it before. It’s tangy, sweet, and refreshing, but didn’t sell at all. What a shame!

Most recently I made somewhat of a clique soup, cucumber-melon. I don’t know if that is more of a lotion scent or a culinary experience, but I lucked out. I used honeydew melons that where so sweet and juicy I couldn’t believe it. The addition of just enough cucumber evened out the sweetness, and lemon-pepper cucumbers as a garnish leveled the field on sweet and savory.

With only a few more swealtering days of August heat I’m planning to try a peach-cantaloupe soup. I also have a few random pieces of tropical fruit and am still stuck on a savory fruit gazpacho.