If you go the traditional route, canned clams, bottled clam juice and store-bought seafood broth will save you quite a bit of time and shopping. But an entirely homemade chowder, with freshly steamed clams or another protein of your choice, such as smoked salmon, could be a fine centerpiece for a welcoming wintertime party.
The fresher the dairy, the less likely to curdle, too, Dojny says. Any kind of dairy can break if you boil the chowder too hard. If your milk does curdle, you can strain out the solids and put the liquid in a blender to bring it all back together. You can skip the dairy altogether and still get that sweet cream flavor by boiling corncobs or using a nondairy milk, such as coconut.
When it comes to the thickening agent, floury potatoes, such as Yukon Gold, will release the most amount of starch and help thicken the stew, but you can supplement with flour or a flour substitute. Bacon or salt pork has been part of chowder from the beginning, but Dojny points out that you can used smoked fish or, not to get ahead of ourselves, leftover smoked Thanksgiving turkey , which can lend a similar flavor without the pork.
Rendering the bacon first gives you a flavorful base on which to start building the soup. If you are making a retro pot with salt pork, you might need a little extra butter. Slice the rind off the salt pork and then dice the meat.
You can also pulse it in a food processor to get the meat into smaller pieces. For this classic chowder, dried thyme is more traditional than fresh, but feel free to use either. If you have fresh clams, scrub 5 to 6 pounds and steam them in 4 cups of water just until they open, 5 to 10 minutes. Then scrape out the clam meat and chop into pea-size pieces. Pour the cooking liquid into a glass measuring cup, let any sediment settle, and pour off 3 cups of the clean broth to use in place of the bottled clam juice.
Chopped hard-shell clams with their liquor can be found fresh or frozen in the seafood section of most supermarkets. Bottled clam juice is usually shelved with the canned fish in the supermarket. Cook the salt pork or bacon with the butter in a large heavy soup pot or Dutch oven over medium-low heat until crisp and the fat is rendered, 10 to 15 minutes.
Remove the cooked bits with a slotted spoon, drain on paper towels, and reserve. Add the onion and celery and cook over medium heat until they begin to soften, about 5 minutes. Sprinkle on the flour and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Add the clam juice and water and bring to a boil over high heat, whisking until smooth. Add the potatoes, thyme and bay leaf, and cook, covered, over medium-low heat until the potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes.
A little starch can give a tongue-coating richness to creamy chowder. Tread lightly here, folks. Or do what Julia Child did and just use cream. Some chefs cook the potatoes in the broth; others simmer them separately in a bit of water. Either way is fine, but the key is to avoid overcooking them. So once you add those spuds, the clock is ticking. And for maximum control, cook them alongside the chowder, drain, and just add them at the end. Either use a blond roux, the potato trick, if your chowder is mostly cream you can do a straight reduction.
When I make a Boston style clam chowder I start by cooking bacon lardons, setting them aside and leaving the fat in the pan. I sweat onions and leek in the fat, then add a little flour and cook until the raw is off the flour and I have a loose blonde roux.
I mash or rice some cooked potato and add that to the roux, then add clam juice, milk and cream, season with salt and white pepper, and bring to a boil only as long as takes for the roux to thicken as much as it's going to -- about two or three minutes. I reduce the heat to a bare simmer, add the cooked, diced potatoes, clams, the reserved bacon lardons, sometimes some finely chopped sorrel or tarragon , and allow the flavors to marry -- about twenty minutes.
Serve with crackers; saltines, hardtack, or oyster crackers are all good. A good hot sauce, though surely not traditional, goes better than you might think.
You don't want your chowder too thick, a light nappe is right. If you like a very thick and sturdy soup, crush some crackers and stir them in. Your dad was right it should be thickened with potato. Hi there, Traditionally, New England Clam chowders are made by first rendering salt pork or bacon over medium low heat and then sweating very small diced onions and celery in that mixture, or some other white mirepoix combo.
You may at this point add some more fat if you are going to make the roux in the Singer method, meaning as part of the overall process, like I do. At this point add flour and stir to combine to create a blond or white roux. It's important to have the right amount of fat in the pan in order to successfully make this type of soup. As an aside, I think you experienced all of that foam from cooking your bacon at too high of a tempurature.
Also, it should be small dice, as the mirepoix. Now at the same time as you are rendering and sweating all of your base ingredients, in a covered pot, steam your clams in stock or water until just opened, if doing it this way. Otherwise, just add your fresh clams when you are ready to simmer--or canned clams when you are closer to being done. Now at this point, it's just a matter of fully incorporating your stock clam stock from the steamed clams, chicken stock or fish , simmering, skimming if necessary and adding various flavoring ingredients at the proper intervals.
After the stock has been fully incporporated and no lumps are present, many add small-dice russet or baking potatoes at this point. This also helps to thicken and give a great clam chowder texture.
Chowders generally require roughly an hour of simmering time in order to properly thicken and to develop the right flavors. As an additional aside, if the chower is going to be cooled and then refrigerated immediately after preparing, it's best to finish it with cream once you reheat because of the high perishability of cream. In a restaurant, chowders are generally finished in batches, in part because of this.
So that's roughly it. I hope that helps. At first, I tried adding a few very thin slices of potato to the mix, figuring they'd break down into individual starch granules relatively rapidly in the broth. It didn't work. The chowder was still broken. Alright, what if instead of waiting for the potatoes to break down naturally, I give them a bit of mechanical aid? I cooked up another batch, this time forcing the potatoes through a potato ricer and whisking the resulting puree into the broth.
No good. The broth was lumpy, off-puttingly grainy, and to top it off, still broken. Next, I figured that perhaps my cooking method had something to do with the broth constantly breaking.
I know that vigorous heating can cause cream to separate. I also know that the exact ratio of cream to milk, and when in the process the cream is added can have a big impact on how its fat and water content behaves. I attempted a dozen more versions, adjusting milk to cream ratios broken Failure after failure after failure.
It's not that any of the chowders were bad , per se, certainly the flavor of the broth was superior to the vast majority of restaurant versions, and the texture of the clams and potatoes was spot on. It's just the liquid that suffered appearance and texture-wise without the roux to hold it together. Then I realized: Perhaps preventing it from breaking is not the way to go about this.
Why not just let the darn stuff break, and fix it later? For my next batch, I made a chowder using the most succesful technique I had attempted thus far, cooking the potatoes and vegetables in milk and adding the cream at the end.
This time, instead of just stirring the chopped clams into the broken end result, Instead, I strained the chowder through a fine mesh strainer and dumped the liquid into my blender, figuring that the violent mechanical action of the blender should be powerful enough to break up those fat droplets, as well as to pulverize a few of the potato cells that may have made their way in there, releasing their starch and helping to keep the mixture homogenous.
It worked like a charm. What came out of the blender was a rich, creamy, perfectly smooth liquid that tasted of clams, pork, and dairy. Not too thick, not too thin, not pasty in the slightest. I poured the liquid back over my strained solids, added the chopped clams, reheated the whole deal, and season it.
Am I overcomplicating things here? But I don't think so. Indeed, I believe that if a traditional dish can be improved using modern techniques and equipment while still maintaining their historic and cultural core, then it is our duty to do so. Chowders have been changing steadily for the past several hundred years, which, incidentally, means that anyone who tells you "that's not real clam chowder" or "chowder needs this or that" is, frankly, full of it.
Why should we now choose to freeze chowders in time, when more than ever before, we have an understanding of the hows and whys of cooking? What ended up in my bowl was more than just the platonic ideal of my childhood Cape Cod memories, it was a dish with a real sense of history about it.
Some folks have tried to argue that barbecue is the only true regional American cuisine; The only dish with an identity in both time and place. Well I have a bowl of chowder here that begs to differ. The only detail remaining? Oyster crackers. Chowder needs oyster crackers. It simply wouldn't be a real clam chowder without'em.
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