Langoustines soup

Ingredients :

- 20 (precooked) Langoustines
- 750 ml dry white wine
- 200 ml homemade fish stock
- 100 ml Vermouth (Noily Prat, Martini etc.)
- 1 celery
- 1 fennel
- 2 carrots
- 1 Spanish onion
- lemon grass
- citrus thyme
- sage
- 1 lime
- 150 g Crème fraîche
- clarified butter
- salt
- fresh milled white pepper
- a pinch of chili pepper

Preparation :

Cut the lemon grass, the celery, the fennel, the carrots and the onion in very small pieces. The lemon grass becomes more intense if you grind it with a pestle in a mortar. Keep some of the cutted carrots and some of the green parts of the fennel aside in the fridge. Stir-fry the rest shortly with the clarified butter for 3-4 minutes in a stock pot. Deglaze everything with the wine, the fish stock and add 1 liter of water. Until the soup is boiling again you can take off the Langoustines tails and clean them. Add the heads with the shears and the empty shells to the soup and let it boil for round about 15 minutes. Then take out the Langoustine add the very fine cutted sage and twitched thyme and let it just simmer for another 10 minutes. Strain everything through a sieve, put the rest of the vegetables to the soup and let it simmer for another 5 minutes. Verify if the soup needs some more acidity (attention : the Crème fraîche will cover some of it, so be more generous). If needed, use some lime juice. Add afterwards the Crème fraîche, the tails, and the vermouth and let it simmer again until the tails are hot and the vegetable still crunchy. Don’t boil it anymore (if also kids are eating, skip the vermouth or boil it again for 5 minutes). Spice it up with salt and pepper and a dash of chili pepper. Use big, warmed plates for the soup and arrange 4-5 tails in the middle and serve it with fresh white bread. If you want you can decorate it with some fine cuttet parsley and some red pepper.

A tip for those who like raw salmon : Before you serve the plates at the table add some small pieces of fresh salmon in the soup. The heat of the soup just has to heat up the fish a little bit from the outside but the core remains raw – yummy !

I know that normally you don’t drink a wine to a soup. But we aren’t normal and therefore we have had a 2003 Cramposie Selectionata to that dish. Really dry, mature, spicy white wines are a perfect match here. So try a classic, old white Rioja or an ice cold Fino Sherry. You won’t regret it.

Enjoy it !

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Tagged as: Langoustines, Langustinos, soup, Suppe, Weisswein, white wine