Friday Fungus: Hungarian Mushroom Soup (with some soda bread)

This week The Mushroom Channel - that must read/watch/listen for the serious fungi fan - featured a Hungarian mushroom soup from an American food blog, 'For the Love of Cooking'. We decided - or rather Kathryn, who is a better soup cook than me, decided - that with a tweak or two this would make a great lunch dish. Maybe with some soda bread (we use Nigel Slater's pretty foolproof recipe) - which comes out like this:

All very good but you need to know about the tweaking to the soup recipe! Since we didn't have a whole pound of mushrooms (let alone 8oz of white and 8oz of brown mushrooms) we had to make use of the dried stock - a handful of dried wild mushrooms and a handful of dried porcini did the trick. And, even better, soaking these in hot water provided a great basis for the stock - topped up with some good chicken stock this made for a really strong mushroom flavour.

Further, since we didn't have any soured cream (funny what one doesn't keep in store), we needed an alternative - provided by the remainder of the buttermilk used to make the soda bread.

The result was a fantastic soup - joined with the warm soda bread for a great lunch!

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