Harvest Mushroom Soup Recipe

When the wind starts blowing, and the leaves start falling, there is just nothing that warms you up better than a nice hearty mushroom soup. I like to highlight foods I’ve found while traveling. Usually, it is something that is not very well-known in the States, but many people eat mushroom soup in the U.S.A. Hopefully this is a new twist on an old recipe.

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We first had this soup in one of our favorite restaurants in Misawa, Japan. Northern Japan can be very cold and snowy, so every now and then during those long winters we would head down to the Russian restaurant for this delicious warm up.

The chef and owner of the restaurant had lived in Moscow for a few years to study Russian cuisine. While there, he married a Muscovite. So, I don’t really know if this recipe is more Japanese or more Russian. To be sure, both countries have fantastic mushrooms to use.

That’s one of the beauties of this soup; you can use whatever mushrooms are grown in your area. Here in Germany, we have used German mushrooms and Pfifferlinge (Chanterelles).

Once, while we were renting a vacation cottage in the Loire Valley, we came upon a great variety of local mushrooms and of course had to make mushroom soup. We tried to obtain all the ingredients at the local supermarché, but we forgot one, the flour.

We only needed a little to thicken the stock, so we decided to take a small cup and go borrow some from a neighbor. The problem was, I could not, for the life of me, remember how to say “flour” in French. We mimed, we described, and we tried and tried to convey to our neighbor we needed flour.

This wonderful Frenchman and his four year old son tried every “white powder” he could think of in the kitchen. I didn’t know there were so many, but yes, we finally were successful and he gladly filled our small cup and sent us on our way. We were really thankful, because boy did that soup taste amazing!