Serious Eats: Recipes
Dinner Tonight: Sweet Corn Soup with Avocado Cream
It seems like every recipe for chowder uses liberal amounts of heavy cream. That might make soup instantly rich and delicious, but it's not exactly healthy.
My girlfriend loves corn chowder, but just about every recipe has too much dairy and upsets her stomach. When I was casually flipping through Suzanne Goin's Sunday Suppers at Lucques and read how much people swore by "this rich soup must have cream in it," we set out to try.
At first I was pretty disappointed: the pureed corn, potatoes, onion, and chilies tasted sweet and bland. I couldn't tell whether my corn was too starchy or if I'd cooked it incorrectly. But everything changed once I whipped up the avocado puree, spiked with lime juice and jalapenos, which gets dolloped on top. It melted into the soup, offering a bracing acidity that set all the flavors in relief.