and thanks welcome back to the kitchen we're here at thoroughbreds in today's topic we're going to teach you how to make a seafood chowder so i'm going to walk you through all the steps to making a seafood chowder or any chowder for that matter so let's lay out our ingredients we have our fresh vegetables and herbs for our seafood selection we have a local shrimp we have hawaiian mahi mahi that i sous-vide we have two pounds of blue swimming crab two pounds of atlantic salmon here we have four pounds of our grouper scraps i saved those from butchering we have our shrimp shells that's for the stock we have three gallons of h2o four cups of sherry wine any sherry wine will do for our roux we have one pound of butter one pound of flour and for our liquids two quarts of heavy cream and one gallon of whole milk now the first thing we want to do when making a soup or a chowder is begin our stock you know as we know the best soups start with a great stock a stock is going to enrich flavor and it's going to give it the backbone your soup needs to really be great so what we're going to do is we're just going to large chop these onions cut them in half cut them into about six pieces we're going to take our celery after you have the celery rinsed very well we're just going to cut that into inch and a half pieces for our soup move that aside we're going to peel our carrots and we're going to cut those into inch and a half pieces as well so large chunks we're going to go ahead and cook our stock for a few hours so we definitely want to have large enough chunks that way we don't macerate our vegetables now the star of the show obviously for the stock is i had saved these lobster heads we got from maine we got in some live lobsters and didn't have a utilization for the heads at first but here we go making a stock is a beautiful place for them so once you have all your mise and plots ready for your stock we're just going to go ahead and load up the pan so now we got everything ready for our stock we're just gonna load the stock pot with our vegetables and go ahead make sure they're in there clean your board with your knife and once you got that ready we're gonna plunge these lobster heads in there one at a time just make sure you left enough room in your stockpot for the vegetables and the lobster heads and also those shrimp shells we saved from cleaning the shrimp so just push them down once you have everything in there we're gonna add some fresh garlic six to eight cloves we're gonna add six to eight bay leaves a little bit of aromatics in there we're also gonna finish it off with old bay seasoning two tablespoons and just give it a stir that way it's ready for the stove so now we have our lobster stock on the stove and we're going to begin the prep work for our soup portion and we're just going to go ahead and cut the carrots in the fourth and cut them to a medium dice we're going to line up our celery now i cut them into sticks makes it a lot easier to cut these into a medium dice for the soup and just take your knife run that all the way down when you get to the bottom go ahead curl in your fingertips so you don't cut them so we'll get our celery in with the carrots and that's why it's a good it's a good thing to do your stock and get that going ahead of time because by the time you're ready to make your soup and start assembling it it would have been on the stove for enough time so we're just going to grab this other stack of celery we're going to medium dice it go ahead make sure curl in your fingers make sure you don't cut yourself and we'll get all of our vegetables diced for our soup while our stock is on the stove lastly we're going to go ahead get our onions cut them from side to side and we're going to give those a small to medium dice as well you don't want the dice too small because what we're going to do with the vegetables is give it a saute on the stove so you don't want all of your vegetables to disappear for your seafood chowder so go ahead each onion cut from side to side now i i can cut pretty fast if you have to go slower at home just take your time so you don't cut yourself another onion side to side we'll cut that into a medium dice and just continue on with our soup and we're almost done with our onions we're going to cut this side to side get it medium dice last onion again side to side and with a nice neat and clean medium dice so next we're going to prep our garlic so what i like to do with the garlic is smash it just take it on the board smash the clove with your knife sweep it aside get them all smashed and that's going to make it so we can easily mince up this garlic for the soup now with the garlic you want to get that pretty small uh for the saute that way you can impart as much flavor in the soup as possible so we're going to we're going to saute that garlic with the vegetables just get this chopped up here get it nice and small like i was saying mince mints minced mince mints and we'll go ahead and we'll get that ready for the soup we'll get this right in our container next we're going to do the shallots we're going to small dice our shallots and that's going to build another layer of flavor for the seafood chowder uh so we're going to take the shallots cut them in half now what you want to do i zoomed in for this you want to go side to side then you want to cut down into strips on top of the shallot and then what we're going to do is work our knife through again try to curl our fingers in so you don't cut yourself and what we end up with is a nice small dice for our shallot and it's gonna it's gonna make our soup very flavorful so i've got the prep work done i got the shallots garlic we have our mirepoix we have carrots celery and onions medium dice garlic is nice and minced and also our shallots are a nice small dice to start the base of our soup now that we have our vegetables prepped we can go ahead and cook the seafood scraps for our soup so here's our grouper salmon and local shrimp we're just gonna put that 450 degree oven for five to six minutes now we have a lot of our prep work done i've had this lobster stock on the stove for roughly an hour to an hour and 15 minutes just simmering away with our vegetables our aromatics we're going to cook this for probably another hour i just like to check it to make sure we're developing enough flavor and it's looking pretty good now we're going to move on to building the flavor the fundamental vegetable flavor for our soup so i've got an even larger stock pot i've got some oil in the bottom and we're just going to start with our finely minced garlic we're going to get that in our stockpot we're going to saute that for two to three minutes on a medium heat and that's gonna that's gonna be flavor build number one flavor build number two is gonna be our shallots we're gonna get those in and we'll just continue to cook them with the garlic now for about two minutes we wanna sweat the flavors of the garlic and shallots into the oil and after that then we'll add the rest of our vegetables and give that a light saute but it's just important to start with our garlic and shallots just to begin building flavor in this soup so great soups are built with great flavor levels so this has been sauteing for about two minutes you can see we're not trying to brown it we're not trying to overcook it because you get a bitter flavor we're just trying to cook it perfect here is our mirepoix we're going to get our carrots celery and onion in this large stockpot and we're going to saute that for three to four minutes doing the same process we just want to sweat those vegetables get them in the pan and get those flavors to start coming out so just go ahead grab your rubber spatula give it a nice stir and we'll report back in a few minutes once we have our saute right so here's another thing while i was doing the prep work i went ahead and chopped our red potatoes into a large pretty much a large dice and what we want to do is cook them separately from the soup stock so you have plenty of time get those potatoes cooked off these vegetables have been cooking for three to four minutes and as you can see they're nice the oils have begun to sweat out it's begun to develop the flavor that we're looking for in our soup and after that we're gonna go ahead and deglaze with our four cups of sherry and that's gonna lift off any flavor that we left on the bottom of that stockpot so go ahead deglaze we're gonna give it a stir we're gonna add at this time we're gonna add our heavy cream two quarts of heavy cream to our stock pot after that we're going to add our gallon of whole milk if you can use the good milk the better milk at the store hole whole fat is better for this application and we're going to give it a stir we're going to bring it up to a simmer and then begin the next phase now this is our lobster stock that's been on the stove for roughly two hours and i've cooked much of the flavor out of these lobster heads we've extracted it and now what we're going to do is we're going to add that to our cream mixture in our soup so go ahead set up a fine chinwa and a china cap and it's helpful to take out most of the lobster heads ahead of time that way you don't slosh boiling liquid on yourself when you're trying to strain it for the soup that's never fun so let's get these lobster heads out of the soup and into the strainer so we're going to go ahead and you want to use a fine strainer to strain out the fine particles and also a large strainer to make sure you got the large particles and just give it a tap on the side we're going to get all that stock and all that flavor out of there because that's what we want just go ahead and discard your cooked lobster heads and your cooked vegetables so now that's done we have our cream to a simmer with our vegetables and we're going to add the lobster stock right to our soup as you can see it's going to come up nicely once the stock is in there we're going to go ahead and this is where we're going to re-fortify the soup we're going to add another layer of flavor with our dried thyme we're going to go ahead with our dried oregano now that's two tablespoons each so we want to get our herbs in there at this stage of the game and this is another fortification process i've got 12 ounces of lobster base that i picked up from the distributor so basically that's a lobster reduction so we're adding even more lobster flavor to our soup and we're going to give give that a nice stir we're going to begin to cook this for about 20 to 30 minutes just to let all the flavors come together in ourselves next once we have our soup cooking we're going to go ahead and make our roux so that's our one pound of butter and one pound of flour so in this application i like to do a reverse roux process and because it works a lot better you don't have to worry about scorching the roux on the bottom of the pan throughout your cooking process and it's just much more functional when you're talking about a really thickened soup especially cream base so we're gonna go ahead get our butter in the pan we're gonna melt that one pound of butter and slowly whisk in our one pound of flour and we're just gonna whisk that together in a small pot next to our large stock pot we're gonna cook this for probably around four to five minutes now you know when your roux is done when it has a wet sand consistency if you've ever been to the beach and you've had a wet bubbly sand under your feet and that's exactly what we want from our roux mixture is to resemble wet sand so i'm going to zoom in and you can see that it's bubbling away it's getting toasty flavors from the heat and we're just going to give it a whisk and if you look at the side of the pan you can see that it resembles wet sand and this room is just about done so we're going to continue to cook it continue to whisk it and get it ready for our soup so i'm going to cook this for probably 30 more seconds and like i said i'll show you a reverse brewing process i learned about it and now it's the only one i use so i have my seafood chowder mixture up to a simmer and this is when we're gonna add our roux and it's so simple folks we're just gonna add our reverse roux add it in a small stream continually stirring you don't want it to form large clumps in your soup and it guarantees that you will not have a scorched flavor in your large pot of soup ever so if you've ever made large cream soups with a roux before you realize what i'm talking about you could scorch it if you do a reverse roux process it takes that factor out of it and you don't have to worry about it so we're going to continue cooking our seafood chowder for about 10 to 15 minutes until that reverse roux thickens and then we'll we'll go ahead and start adding our seafood and the rest of our flavor components so this soup has been cooking for about 15 minutes and as you can see that flour butter mixture that we made the roux has began to thicken it to a nice creamy texture and creamy consistency so once you have that done it's time to start pretty much the final process we're going to go ahead we're going to add those cooked potatoes to the soup so i cook those till they'll they're you know they're pretty pretty soft but not so soft as they're falling apart so go ahead get your potatoes in there give it a nice stir now during this process go ahead have your pan on low heat because you do not want to burn anything on the bottom of your pan so we've got the potatoes in there next we're going to add our cooked seafood now the reason we cooked the seafood ahead of time oh last one is uh we don't want to cook that in the soup we don't we don't want them to break into real small pieces from my experience with a nice carolina seafood chowder the guests are just amazed with these big chunks of fish and just the variety that goes in here again we had the shrimp we had the hawaiian mahi mahi that i sous-vide we had the crab we had the salmon and the grouper and of course our fortified stock with the shrimp shells and the lobster heads so i got our cooked fish in there now i'm going to go ahead and put our sous-vide fish in there and also the last thing you want to do is add your crab the crab breaks up the easiest so you want to add it last as though to keep nice chunks of crab in your soup so as you can see it's a pretty full kettle i'm just stretching the limits of this kettle so go ahead and stir it up and we're going to give it a final seasoning now this is where you can adjust your salt and pepper so i'm just going to add a little bit of kosher salt we're going to add some freshly ground pepper and this is the ultimate flavor is we're going to add a quarter cup of cajun seasoning and that just adds that extra spice level in the soup and just finishes it off beautifully so go ahead carefully stir in your seasonings with a large spoon and be careful as though not to break up your seafood too much i mean a little bit is fine but you don't want it broken up and this is what we're left with this is the ultimate seafood chowder uh the reason i made this video is our guests love it again thanks for watching food fox chef john tapper the second and we'll share more videos you