Thick Mushroom Bisque

Serves 6-12

Personal commentary:
Bisque originates in France, the word originally just meant crayfish soup. It was a creamy soup
cooked with lobster and other shellfish, but over time it’s definition became looser and
encompassed all creamy soups similar to the original. Bisque can be made with many different
ingredients such as oyster, fish, tomato, and mushrooms, making it a very versatile recipe.
Before agriculture, humans scavenged for their food; a modern form of scavenging mushroom
hunting is a popular tradition in many places around the world, including Colorado. When
mushroom hunting, you don't know what you will come back with, that is why mushroom bisque
is so great. You can throw whatever mushrooms you have into the soup, and it will taste
delicious, as long as the mushrooms were edible. In my opinion, the best mushroom bisque is
made when you find a big patch of fresh chanterelles and some morels, yum.

Ingredients​:
1 pound of white mushrooms, trimmed
8 oz cremini mushrooms, trimmed
8 oz shiitake mushrooms, stemmed
Substitute mushrooms in recipe with wild mushrooms as available
Kosher salt and pepper
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 small onion, chopped fine
1 sprig fresh thyme tied with kitchen twine
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
4 cups of water
3 ½ cups chicken broth
1 teaspoon lemon juice
Chopped fresh chives as a garnish
2/3 cup heavy cream

Materials:
Dutch oven
Measuring cups
Blender
Digital thermometer
microwave

Experiment, what I tried:

Mushroom bisque is traditionally a very thick soup, so thick that you could use as a sauce if you
wanted. Mushroom bisque is also usually thickened using just cream, but in a Cook’s Illustrated
magazine they recommended replacing some of the cream with egg yolk. Because of this
recommendation, I wanted to test, by weight, what thickeners thicken soup the most, and taste
good. Because I wanted to compare the thickeners to each other by weight, and still add cream
to the soup in every test, to actually make it bisque, I kept the recommended amount of cream
in the soup and replaced the egg yolk with other thickeners like more cream and flour. While
making the meal, the egg yolk I used for the egg batch weighed 26 grams because of this I used
26 grams more than normal of cream, and used 26 grams of flour in their batches. I tested three
dependant variables on the three batches the first was how thick it tasted, the second was how
“mushroomy” it tasted, and the third was how viscous or how thick it actually was. When the
experiments concluded I was surprised by some of the results. The most mushroomy tasting
soup was the egg batch, the most thick tasting soup was the cream batch and the most viscous
batch was a tie between egg and flour. The result that surprised me was that the batch that was
voted the most thick tasting was actually 2 times less thick than the others. I would recommend
using the original recipe because it is the most mushroomy and the thickest, but if you prefer
thick tasting instead of actual thickness then add an extra fourth cup of heavy cream.

Procedure:
Step 1:
Toss mushrooms with 1 tablespoon of salt in a large bowl. Set plate on top of bowl and put in
microwave for 4 minutes. After 4 minutes in the microwave take the bowl out stir it around and
repeat the microwaving 4 minutes at a time, stirring every time you take it out, until mushrooms
have released their liquid and reduced to ⅓ their volume. Separate liquid and mushrooms with
colander and save the liquid.
Step 2:
Heat oil in a Dutch oven over medium heat until shimmering. Add mushrooms and cook stirring
occasionally until mushrooms are browned, which takes about 8 minutes. Add the onion, thyme
sprig and ¼ a teaspoon of pepper and cook still stirring occasionally until onion is softened
which takes about 2 minutes. Add the sherry and cook until it’s evaporated. Stir in the
mushroom liquid and cook it. Stir in the water and the broth and bring to a simmer. Then reduce
heat to low and simmer for 20 minutes.

Step 3:
Take out the thyme sprig. Process the soup in a blender, on high, until smooth around 1.5 - 2
minutes. It is recommended that this is done in batches. Then return the soup to the pot.

Step 4:
Whisk the thickeners together in a medium bowl. Stirring constantly and slowly add 2 cups of
the soup to the thickeners, then, again stirring constantly, slowly add the mixture back into the
simmering soup. Heat gently while stirring constantly to 165 degrees fahrenheit. Stir in lemon
juice, add pepper and salt to taste preferences, garnish with chives and serve.

Science
Viscosity, What Makes Soup Thick?:
Viscosity is essential to fluid dynamics, but with most fluids it’s more simple than one would
believe. In essence viscosity is how much a fluid resists flow. One example that most people
have experienced is trying to mix something that is very viscous. When you have a thick sauce
or soup it takes a lot more effort so stir it than if is was less thick. The broth in ramen has a low
viscosity causing less resistance while the moving around a spoon. On the other hand, Thai
peanut sauce has a high viscosity causing a large amount of resistance while moving around a
spoon. Though this answers the question of what viscosity is we still don't know why different
fluids have different viscosities. Like other types of resistance like friction viscosity is dependant
on particles colliding into each other, and the more often they collide the more viscous the fluid
is.

Increasing the density of particles in a fluid is the main way that chefs thicken liquids, and there
are three main ways that I will be testing in my experiments adding more particles, adding fat
and adding proteins.

Adding More Particles:

As shown in the above diagram the higher the particle density the more viscous the liquid is, so
to increase viscosity we can just add more particles. Chefs usually use fine grained non-soluble
powders such as flour and cornstarch to add these particles. When starches are used the tiny
particles can clump up, absorb water, and swell causing even more collisions.

Adding Fat:
Another way to increase particle density, besides just adding particles, is by adding fat. Because
fat is nonpolar and water is polar they repel each other. Because they repel, fat will form little
droplets in water forcing water molecules to collide more often increasing viscosity. But left
untouched all of those fat droplets will congeal together and form bigger droplets but decreasing
the particle density. Eventually the oil can gather into one big blob, now having no effect on
viscosity. One way to prevent this is to use an emulsifying agent. An emulsion agent is a
compound that has a hydrophobic (water fearing) tail and a hydrophilic (water loving) head. The
tail of the molecule attaches to the little oil droplets, and the head attaches to water molecules
forming a membrane between the fat bubble and the water. That membrane prevents the fat
from congealing keeping it as a bunch of small droplets keeping the viscosity high and not
letting the oil separate after sitting for a while.

Adding Proteins:
Another example of a thickener at work is adding proteins. When heated proteins will denature
becoming long tangled strings impeding the movement of particles, and separating fat droplets
into more particles causing more collisions, but, how does protein denaturation work?
Proteins are long molecular chains that are coiled in different shapes to do different things in out
bodies. The shape of those molecular chains is held in still mainly by hydrogen bonds.
Hydrogen bonds are weak bonds that are not formed by the exchange of electrons, but by the
charge of the atom due to a bond with another atom. Hydrogen bonds are formed between a
hydrogen atom positively charged due to its bond with a electronegative atom and another
atom, nitrogen oxygen or fluorine that is negatively charged due to its electronegativity. Because
these bonds are weak, simply heating the proteins up can break the hydrogen bonds and other
forces that keep the proteins in shape letting them wiggle straight.

While the proteins are wiggling some of those hydrogen bonds that held the shape of the protein
now attach multiple proteins together at multiple points along a protein, creating a sort of
tangled web.