[corn husks snapping]
- Inga: I really love cooking for people,
especially in the summertime
when the ingredients are ripe for the picking
and we can gather as a little community
and sit down for a meal.
[gentle acoustic guitar music]
I wanted to make a corn chowder.
Corn is like, so wonderful when it's ripe,
and it has to be ripe to make this chowder.
It kind of is just a little love letter to summertime
with the chowder.
The key to making anything
is to find the best quality ingredients possible.
So I picked up some of the corn at the farmers market.
The potatoes came outta my garden,
the onions outta my garden, the bacon from a local farm.
And that's what makes things really amazing.
So not only am I gathering
with a community in Prairie Farm for eating,
but I'm using a community of farmers' ingredients
to cook up this dish.
The first thing I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna turn my soup pot on to medium, medium-high.
And I'm just gonna put a little bit of butter
in the bottom of my pan,
because as a dairy farmer, I have to always use
some sort of dairy product while I'm cooking.
So now that the butter is melted,
I'm gonna start adding in the bacon.
And I just sliced them right on up,
so they're nice, small pieces
that'll crisp up really well with the butter.
[bacon sizzling]
When I'm working with stews or soups or even braising,
I often will start with the bacon.
And that's kind of that first base level of the flavors.
So it's crisping up in my pan.
I can get those nice bacon bits up later on
as the soup cooks.
It's giving the kitchen an amazing smell,
and it's making me awfully hungry.
And then, now you're just gonna add one onion, finely diced.
Let the onion and the bacon cook up
until the onion is nice and soft.
A few minutes and then we'll start adding
our other ingredients.
[food sizzling]
Now that the bacon and the onions have cooked down,
we're gonna make a little bit of a roux
to get that thickness in our chowder.
I'm just gonna push the bacon and the onions
off to the side of my pan,
making a little hole in the middle.
And then I'm gonna sprinkle in about a quarter cup of flour.
While I'm sprinkling in little bits by bits,
I'm just gonna stir like crazy so it can get incorporated.
And like I said, this is just gonna make it nice and thick.
Give it a little consistency.
Once that flour is mixed in now,
I'm just gonna add in five cups of vegetable broth.
So I'm slowly adding the broth in
and I'm scraping up all the bits and pieces
on the bottom of my pan at the same time.
Now we're gonna add to our broth, bacon, and onions,
a few cloves of garlic.
We're gonna add in eight ears of corn,
which is quite a lot,
but it's gonna get a really beautiful corn flavor.
So eight ears of corn are going into my soup pot here.
And then I'm gonna add in a few diced up potatoes.
They're maybe like a half-inch dice
and I just kept everything as uniform as possible
so that the potatoes can all cook at the same time.
Stir those in.
And give it a good shake of salt and pepper.
[pepper grinding]
I'm gonna add in some bay leaf for flavor.
And a little bit of tarragon that came from the garden here.
Summer's also a great time to be using your fresh herbs.
All right, so now I'm gonna turn up the heat,
get it boiling, and then I'll turn it down
to a simmer and let it cook.
The last thing I'm gonna add is two of my corn cobs.
As the soup cooks, it's gonna grab any moisture
and flavor from these stalks.
And it kinda looks fun too.
So I'll get this rolling, cook it down,
and then we'll get ready to serve it.
Now the house is filled with the aroma
of summer cooking on the stove.
I'm gonna finish the soup off with just a few more steps.
The first thing I'm gonna do
is take out my bay leaf that I put in there.
That's not something that anybody needs to have
caught in their mouth when they're eating soup.
And then I'm gonna take out my corn cobs.
And now I'm gonna add, maybe like a quarter
of the corn and potato mixture into my Cuisinart.
And I'm gonna puree those up in my Cuisinart,
and that's gonna give the soup nice little consistency
of creamy flavor.
[Cuisinart humming]
That looks good, nice and steamy.
There's still plenty of crunch in the soup
with the corn kernels, but this will just give it
that sort of chowdery mouthfeel.
Okay, and to finish that soup,
I'm gonna add a lot of heavy cream.
The key to cooking anything is lots of butter,
lots of heavy cream.
And I'm just gonna pour some in.
We'll start with, I'm gonna go full cup.
I think that'll be delicious.
It smells gorgeous.
And then when you're serving your soup,
you're just gonna ladle out a nice ladle full.
Doesn't that look amazing?
Clam chowder without the clams and more corn, delicious.
The showstopping ingredient is gonna be the pumpkin seed oil
that I'm gonna just garnish the top of the soup with,
and that's gonna give it so much more flavor.
It's gonna be really delicious.
And I think the pumpkin seed oil goes perfectly
with corn as well.
And we should probably put a few pumpkin seeds on top.
And then even a little piece of basil
for a little hint of green.
And there you go.
Your summer corn chowder is now ready to be served.