Some months ago I was looking for an easy and light dinner, and ended up buying a box of a premium brand's ready-to-eat Jerusalem artichoke soup. Before heating the soup I googled the manufacturer and found their recipe site, which suggested a bacon and tomato topping for it. Both S and I were pleasantly surprised by the smooth texture and the exquisite taste, but being the foodie I am, eating soup from a carton felt wrong.
So our first encounter with Jerusalem artichokes happened in the middle of the summer, and I assumed it would be trivial to buy them at any market. I did immediately find a few plastic bags of half-rotten tubers at the nearby supermarket, but I wasn't ready to settle for anything but perfect. Soon my trusty greengrocer explained that Jerusalem artichokes are an autumn crop, and that fresh tubers start to appear in the shops in late October. I also found out that the plant is no relation of the artichoke at all. It is a sunflower from North America, and the "Jerusalem" is apparently what English speakers made of girasole, the Italian word for sunflower.
A couple of weeks ago I found a small bag of tiny fresh tubers and made my first batch of Jerusalem artichoke soup. Peeling the tubers was a pain, as they look a lot like fresh ginger. Peeled tubers also brown quickly when exposed to air, so they need to go into water as soon as possible. The small, gnarly and uneven tubers took so long to peel that I actually made a mental note never to make the soup from scratch again. But because the soup turned out really good, I decided to give Jerusalem artichokes another go when I saw a batch of big tubers at the greengrocer's. This time I only washed them carefully and scrubbed off the worst parts, leaving the skin on. This saved a lot of time and effort, and unless you are a glutton for punishment, I suggest doing the same.
I haven't bought sun-dried tomatoes since I first made oven-dried tomatoes some two years ago. They're cheaper, have less oil and taste every bit as good as the ones from the shop, if not much better. The recipe is in Finnish, but basically you halve the tomatoes, brush them lightly with olive oil, sprinkle them with salt, coriander and balsamico, and bake them for 4-9 hours at the oven's lowest setting with the door slightly open to let the steam escape. They shrink to about a third of their size, and the sweet acidity gets so concentrated that it is hard not to snack on them straight off the tray. Back then I wondered a little whether it was decent to run an electric oven for nine hours straight, and comforted myself that the end of the hard frosts had eased the load on Fingrid, the national grid.
Recipe card
Jerusalem Artichoke Soup With Sun Dried Tomatoes and Bacon Topping
- Serves 4-6
- Cooking the vegetables 10-20 min
You will need
Soup
| 1 kg (2.2 lb) | Jerusalem artichokes |
| 1 | medium-to-big parsnip |
| 2 | potatoes |
| 200 ml (a scant cup) | cream |
| chicken broth | |
| salt and pepper to taste | |
| egg yolks for thickening (optional) | |
| parsley |
Topping
| 150 g (5 oz) | bacon |
| 200 ml (a scant cup) | sun-dried tomatoes, or a couple of fresh tomatoes |
| 5 | cloves of garlic |
| croutons |
Method
- Scrub the Jerusalem artichokes carefully, or peel them. Peel the parsnip and potatoes, and cut everything into large cubes to speed up cooking.
- Cover the vegetables with chicken broth and cook until soft, about 10-20 minutes. Keep the cooking liquid.
- Purée the vegetables with the cream, and add cooking liquid until the soup runs smoothly. Season with salt and pepper. Use egg yolks if you need to thicken the soup. Add finely cut parsley.
- Cut the bacon into strips and fry with crushed garlic until nicely browned. Add the tomatoes.
- Spoon the bacon and tomato mixture on top of the soup and add croutons. Decorate with parsley leaves.
4 comments
Nayttaa hyvalta 🙂
lovely soup
welcome back! 🙂
Thanks fiordizucca, it's good to have the energy to write again =)
This is a wonderful soup, much like we have been enjoying for years. Using egg yolks to thicken is a new twist, at least to me. Good idea.
DocChuck
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