Recipe: Sweet Corn Velouté w/ Chorizo Film

by ferdie, in partnership with Unearthed for Action Against Hunger

This is a pretty standard flavour combination, the film is almost undetectable but adds a strong complementary chorizo flavour to the thyme infused corn soup. Another contributing factor is taking a proportion of the corn and frying it to within an inch of it's life, giving it a charred savoury popcorn-esque dimension to the flavour of the soup! It usually goes down pretty well! 

Flavour 1: Sweetcorn

Flavour 2: Chorizo (pronounced cho-ree-tho)

INGREDIENTS (serves 6)

Sweetcorn Veloute
8 cobs sweet corn (if you're going to use tinned use 4 tins unsweetened corn 280g each)
4 tbsp EVO
1.0 litre veg/chicken stock (or 2 pints water + 2 stock cubes)
10g lemon thyme
50g butter
1 tsp table salt
250 ml double cream
1 large onion (finely chopped)

Chorizo Film
75g chorizo diced
50ml milk (semi skimmed fine)
150ml single cream

Lemon thyme imparts a wonderful fresh depth to the soup.

METHOD
Blend 3/4 of the corn until smooth and put aside.
Put stock, and cream in pot with bouquet garni of thyme and extra virgin olive oil.
Set to boil, then simmer for 20 mins to infuse with the lemon thyme.

Charring the sweetcorn adds an extra facet to the flavour.

Put remaining 1/4 of the corn in pan, with chopped onions and saute with butter until it's almost starting to burn, in fact the odd charred one will add to the flavour the frying brings out.
Blast the charred corn and onion in blender until smooth.

The chorizo film is an infused cream:
Pan fry finely chopped chorizo, let the fat seep out, add the cream and mix simmering to soak up the flavour of the chorizo for about 10 minutes, after which it will have taken the colour of the paprika from the chorizo, blend the mix, if the mix is a little too thick to sieve return it to the pan and add a little milk to loosen it, then sieve it, squeezing the mix down with a wooden spoon to extract as much flavour as possible. 

Put it into a squeazy bottle and, once cooled, into the fridge until ready for use.

TIP: If you want to make a chorizo and leek pie you can get away with not blending the chorizo and cream, simply loosen it and sieve it and keep the chorizo back to mix with leek for a nice pie filler!

Serve me! serve me!

When nearing time to serve, remove the chorizo cream from the fridge, to bring it to room temperature.
Finally remove the bouquet garni from the stock and add all the sweetcorn purée. Bring to the boil and simmer not more than 10 minutes or the colour will become dull.

Here you can see the cream starting to spread to form the film.

To serve ladle the soup into bowls and squirt the cream gently (so that it doesn't go under the surface) in a circular motion onto the surface of the soup. Initially it will form lines, but as the cream warms through it will spread to form a film on the surface of the soup. Garnish with a sprig of thyme and serve immediately.

This is a version we did in partnership with  Unearthed for Action Against Hunger 

Me thinks this one sneaked past quality control - served in a bit of a rush! Ahem!

Sweet Corn Veloute w/ Chorizo Film
We used Unearthed spanish chorizo, pre-sliced.
You can find the whole 8 course menu we served here.