The best cream of mushroom soup

🍄 Why these three mushrooms
Cremini, shiitake, oyster. I find those three give a good mix of flavour and texture, I love them, and they’re easy to find at any grocery store. One thing worth knowing: cremini are button mushrooms, just the brown ones. So if you read somewhere that you should add button mushrooms to a soup that already has a pound of cremini in it, skip that. Want to push it further? Pile my sautéed mushrooms in garlic butter on top when you serve.

🔥 Those 7 to 8 minutes are the whole recipe
That step is where the flavour is made. The mushrooms release their water, the water cooks off, and near the end they start to brown. That’s exactly what you want. Crowd the pot or keep the heat too low and you’ll boil them instead of colouring them. Take your time and don’t stir every ten seconds.

🥄 I don’t blend it, on purpose
Creamy doesn’t have to mean pureed. The flour cooked in butter and the 15% cream already give you the velvety body, and the mushroom pieces are the whole point. Want it smooth? It’s your soup. But you’re throwing away half of what makes this one good.

🧈 The butter is a choice
6 tablespoons (90 ml) for 650 g of mushrooms. It’s a lot, I know. Mushrooms drink everything you give them and hand it back as flavour. Cut it down if you want, just don’t tell me afterward that your soup tastes flatter than mine.

🌱 Vegetable broth, almost vegetarian
I used vegetable broth because I thought it tasted good, and because I had some on hand. The result is that only the butter and the cream stand between this and a vegetarian soup. Nobody else makes it this way, and I’m not going back to chicken broth.

🌾 Making it gluten-free
The flour is what thickens this soup, so it isn’t gluten-free as written. I’ve never made it without, but the obvious swap would be cornstarch: whisk about 2 tablespoons into a little cold broth and stir it in once the soup is simmering, instead of cooking flour into the butter. That’s a lead, not something I do.

📅 Make it ahead
Everything can be done ahead. Slice the 650 g of mushrooms, chop the onion and garlic, strip the thyme, measure the flour and the broth, and put each one in its own labelled container. You can even go all the way through the cooking. When guests show up, reheat gently and add the cream off the heat at the very end. You look like a cook and you spend the evening with your people instead of at the stove.

❄️ Freezing
Yes, it freezes very well. Fair warning: it can split a little when it thaws and the texture changes slightly. It still tastes great. Reheat gently while stirring and you won’t see a thing. In the fridge, count on 3 to 4 days.

✅ What to serve with my cream of mushroom soup?

Bread, always bread. A thick slice of decadent rustic bread does the job, cheesy garlic bread does it better, and if you want a full dinner, cut a grilled cheese with chicken, brie and apples in half and lean it against the bowl. A handful of homemade bread croutons on top is the highest-return move of the night. As a starter, I often serve it before my pork chops with creamy mushroom sauce. Yes, that’s mushrooms twice. Nobody has ever complained.