Recommendations: Cheese & Sunchoke Chowder, Pizza Beer
We got sunchokes from the farmers' market this weekend; the lovely folks at Veenstra's Vegetables had a recipe box too, so I grabbed a page that had a bunch of ideas for using them. After reading up a bit about them, it sounds like sunchokes are very easy to maintain and propagate, so I'll consider buying extra this week and planting a small bed of them.

The flavor of a sunchoke is earthy but crisp and refreshing. It really brightens the flavor of a rich comforting soup like a chowder.


Cheese and Sunchoke Chowder recipe
2T butter
1 small onion, sliced
1 lb. Jerusalem artichokes (sunchokes), sliced into water
1 Tbsp lemon juice added to water above
8 oz carrots, sliced
5 tsp all-purpose flour
2 1/2 cups stock
1 1/4 cups milk
8 oz shredded cheese (recipe calls for Gruyere, but we used CoJack and Mozzarella)
1/2 tsp dry mustard
salt & pepper to taste

Melt butter in a deep saucepan, add onion and cook 1 minute, stirring constantly.
Drain sunchokes, add to pan along with carrots.
Cook 2 minutes. Add flour, stir, then gradually add stock.
Bring to boil, cover, reduce heat and simmer 20 minutes.
Blend soup to desired consistency.
Add milk, cheese, seasonings. Stir to combine and blend again if desired.
Bring up heat again but don't boil the soup.

Eat it up yum.

The recipe says that it makes 4 servings. We added more stock because the vegetables weren't fully covered with liquid for the simmer, so we got about 6 servings out of it. We also forgot the flour step, but easily remedied that later by adding a couple teaspoons of corn starch, which we first dissolved in a little water.

The recipe also tells you to julienne and blanch some sunchoke, carrot, and leeks for garnish. We didn't bother with that step, but I'm sure that would be tasty.

We've been drinking this new pizza beer lately and really like it. It's infused with lots of common pizza flavors: garlic, oregano, tomato, etc. and of course tastes awesome with pizza and pasta. Actually, I've found that it tastes good with lots of foods. Give it a try if you see it in the store, it's a local microbrew too, produced for them by Sprecher.