This soup is a hybrid, borne from mismatching the image I had in mind with the recipe I thought I was looking up. It’s a cross between the classic Spanish almond soup ajo blanco, and the French number tourin d’ail.
Unlike ajo blanco and its modern Mediterranean incarnation gazpacho, the soup is served hot, although you could in theory serve it cold. Personally I don’t enjoy cold soups and I’d be surprised if I was the only one. I can just about manage a Bloody Mary.
Having said that the idea of using stale bread to thicken a soup seems perfectly reasonable; it’s not just a perfunctory role either, it also adds its own flavour and produces a velvety-smooth finish. On that note then you need to use a decent white loaf that actually has some character to add, the sort that’s a pleasure to eat with nothing more than a smothering of salted butter.
The almonds need to be whole and blanched, the sort you find on top of a Dundee cake. Sliced almonds not only cost more but generally lack any real almondy-ness and whole ones with the skins on will ruin the look of your soup.
Ingredients
(makes 2l of soup, enough for 8 to 10 people)
3 x whole bulbs of garlic
200g whole blanched almonds
2 x tablespoons olive oil
50g butter
2 x onions, finely chopped (snooker ball size)
200g day-old bread (without crusts), torn into chunks
500ml semi-skimmed milk
1l chicken or vegetable stock
Preheat the oven to 180 ⁰C.
Break the garlic into cloves and roast wrapped in foil, in the oven for 30 mins or until very soft. Peel the garlic as soon as they’re cool enough to handle and set to one side.
Toast the almonds on a baking tray in the oven for 4 or 5 minutes until just starting to take colour.
Heat the olive oil with the butter in a large pan and add the onion. Sweat the onion without colouring, until soft and translucent.
Add the garlic, almonds, stock and milk and bring up to a simmer. Pop a lid on and leave to simmer as gently as possible for 20 mins, the add the bread and simmer for a further 10 minutes.
Whizz batches of the soup in a food processor until smooth, seasoning each batch and adding a little more milk or stock if it’s on the thick side.
Serve with a garnish of toasted almonds, or a few fresh herbs, a parsley coulis or toasted croutons even.