Creamy Mushroom Soup

We wanted to create a mushroom soup that was easily distinguishable from the canned version—in a good way. Here’s what we discovered:

Test Kitchen Discoveries

• Of all the mushroom varieties, we settled on white or cremini mushrooms for this recipe. They are readily available and have a good meaty flavor.
• What might appear to be more mushrooms than you could ever possibly need will reduce down to a fraction of its bulk once cooked. As they cook down, the flavor of the mushrooms is concentrated which makes for a rich, flavorful soup.
• Since your mushrooms will make their way to the blender in the end, there is no need to waste time slicing and chopping them into equal pieces. It is fine to break them up with your hands.
• The extra dose of mushrooms added enough bulk to our soup that we could eliminate flour as a thickening agent. A nice benefit, as flour made the soup pasty.
• Swapping out onions in favor of leeks resulted in the perfect velvety texture we were looking for.
• To accentuate the meatiness of the mushrooms, we used beef broth instead of chicken. We also reduced the cream, as too much of it masked all the other flavors.