Mushroom Soup with Beef Leg Marmalade, Pears and Pickled Mushrooms

A mushroom soup that earns the name — built on dried porcini, a hard sear on fresh mushrooms, and almost no cream — poured around a sticky pile of confit beef shin shredded into a savoury marmalade. Pickled mushrooms cut through the richness with a clean bite of vinegar, and shavings of raw pear add a sweet, floral lift. It's a composed first course that looks like restaurant cooking and tastes more grown-up than any of its parts suggest.

How to cook

This is a three-component dish — soup, marmalade, pickle — and the trick is just sequencing them. The pickle and the cured beef should be started the day before. The soup itself comes together in under an hour on the day, and the marmalade is finished while the soup simmers.

Start the cure the night before. Rub the beef shin (500g) all over with the fine sea salt (2 teaspoons) and sit it on a rack over a plate, uncovered, in the fridge for at least 12 hours. The salt seasons the meat to the centre and pulls out surface moisture so the confit doesn't stew. Don't skip this step — beef shin needs the head start.

The next day, confit the beef. Pat it dry, settle it in a snug ovenproof dish with the carrot, onion, garlic, bay, peppercorns and rosemary, and pour over enough olive oil to fully submerge it (around 400ml — duck fat is even better if you have it). The fit matters: too large a dish and you'll need a litre of oil. Cover tightly with a lid or foil and cook at 120°C (250°F) for 3 to 3.5 hours. The fat should never bubble actively — if you see steady bubbling, drop the oven by 10°C. The beef is ready when a fork slides in with no resistance and the meat falls apart in clumps. You can do this a day ahead and rewarm it in its fat.

The pickle is a 5-minute job. Bring the white wine vinegar (120ml), water (60ml), sugar (2 teaspoons), salt, peppercorns and bay to a simmer just until the sugar dissolves, then pour it hot over the mixed mushrooms (150g) in a jar. Leave them for at least 2 hours, ideally overnight. The small mushrooms — shimeji clusters, enoki, button slices — soften from crunchy-raw into something pleasantly yielding while keeping bright acidity. They keep for two weeks in the fridge.

For the soup, the goal is intensity. Three things deliver it: dried porcini for depth, hard-seared fresh mushrooms for roasted body, and the strained porcini soaking liquid as the actual cooking liquid. Pour just-boiled water (600ml) over the dried porcini (30g) and leave them for 20 minutes — they'll plump up and release a dark, woodsy broth that's the single biggest flavour driver in the bowl. Lift them out, squeeze gently, and chop. The soaking water is full of grit from the porcini, so strain it through a coffee filter or a muslin-lined sieve into a jug. Don't skip the filtering.

Now sear the fresh mushrooms hard. Melt the butter (60g) with the olive oil (2 tablespoons) in a wide heavy pot over medium-high heat — wide, because mushrooms only brown when they have room to breathe. Add the chestnut and portobello in a single layer, in batches if you need to. They'll release a flood of water in the first few minutes; let it cook off without stirring much, then keep going for 8-10 minutes total until the mushrooms are properly browned at the edges and smell roasted, not raw. This is where most mushroom soups go wrong — under-cooked mushrooms taste vegetal and pale, properly browned ones taste of the forest floor.

Drop the heat to medium and add the shallots, sliced garlic and thyme. Sweat for 3-4 minutes until soft, then stir in the chopped porcini and cook another minute. Pour in the sherry (60ml) and let it bubble away completely, scraping the brown bits off the bottom of the pan. Then add the strained porcini liquid (about 550ml after squeezing) and the chicken stock (400ml). Use light chicken stock here, not beef — beef will fight with the marmalade and muddy the soup. Bring to a simmer and cook for 20 minutes for the flavours to settle.

Blend in batches — never more than two-thirds full, hold the lid down with a folded towel — on high for a full minute per batch. A full minute matters. Then pass the soup through a fine-mesh sieve back into a clean pan, pressing firmly with a spatula. The strain is what takes it from "puréed mushroom" to silken. Return to a low heat, stir in the double cream (80ml) — use this little, because more cream rounds the soup off and rounds the mushroom flavour off with it — and the white soy (1 teaspoon). White soy adds savouriness without darkening the soup; regular soy works in a pinch but turns the soup grey. Season hard with salt and white pepper. Taste: it should taste aggressively of mushroom, with the cream just rounding the edges.

For the marmalade, lift the warm beef out of its fat onto a board and shred it with two forks. The strands should fall apart on their own — if anything resists, give it another 20 minutes in the oven. Spoon 3 tablespoons of the confit oil into a wide pan over medium heat and sweat the finely diced shallot for 3-4 minutes until soft and translucent. Add the shredded beef, sherry vinegar (1 tablespoon), Dijon (1 teaspoon) and brown sugar (1 teaspoon). Stir over low heat for 2-3 minutes until everything looks glossy and clingy — the texture should be jam-like, not wet. Taste and season aggressively: it should read sharp from the vinegar, savoury from the beef, slightly sweet, and rich enough to stand up to the soup. If it's flat, more salt and another splash of vinegar. Keep warm.

The pear is the last job, done at the table. Slice the pear lengthways on a mandoline as thin as you can — almost translucent. Skin on for colour. Brush lightly with lemon juice to keep it from browning while you plate.

Bonus points

• Build a proper mushroom stock: Replace the chicken stock entirely with a stock made from mushroom trimmings (stems, peelings) simmered with a halved onion, a bay leaf and a strip of kombu for 30 minutes. Pushes the soup further into pure mushroom territory.
• Toast the porcini before rehydrating: Dry-toast the dried porcini (30g) in a hot pan for 30-60 seconds until intensely fragrant before pouring over the boiling water. The flavour gets darker and nuttier.
• Mushroom oil drizzle: Warm 100ml neutral oil with 10g dried porcini at 70°C for 30 minutes, then strain. A few drops in the centre of each bowl reads as concentrated mushroom essence.
• Crispy mushroom garnish: Slice 4-5 small button mushrooms paper-thin on a mandoline and roast on parchment at 90°C for 90 minutes until fully crisp. Adds shatter-crisp texture against the silky soup.
• Brown butter the marmalade: Cook the confit oil to a deep nut-brown before adding the shallot. The nuttiness gives the marmalade an extra dimension that sits perfectly under the pickled mushrooms.
• Brioche shard: A thin slice of buttered brioche baked between parchment until shatter-crisp, leaning into the bowl, gives an elegant carb element without filling anyone up.

Serving

Warm the bowls properly — this soup loses its temperature fast and a cold bowl murders it in seconds. Use wide shallow bowls with a deep well so the marmalade sits proudly in the centre and the soup pools around it like a moat.

The order of plating matters. Quenelle or spoon a generous mound of warm marmalade into the centre first. Pour the hot soup carefully around it from a small jug — don't ladle from above, you'll bury the marmalade. Drape three or four pear slices over the marmalade so they fan outwards, then scatter five or six drained pickled mushrooms across the top. Finish with a few drops of good extra-virgin olive oil and a tiny pinch of flaky salt on the pear.

Serve immediately. For drinks, this dish wants something with weight and oxidative depth — a glass of dry oloroso or amontillado sherry is the ideal match, picking up the sherry already in the soup and the savoury beef. If you'd rather have wine, a mature white Burgundy or an aged Riesling both work. For something lighter, a dry farmhouse cider with real acidity does the job beautifully.