Sopa de Ajo

Our November Daring Cooks’ hostess was Begoña, who writes the beautiful blog, Las recetas de Marichu y las mías. Begoña is from Spain and didn’t want to go with the more common challenges of paella or gazpacho, she wanted to share with us another very popular recipe from Spain that we don’t see as often called Sopa Castellana which is a delicious bread soup!

We make bread almost every week, so looked forward to incorporating it into our Daring Cooks challenge recipe. Since our bread is based on the recipe from the Tartine cookbook (Tartine being a much-lauded bakery here in San Francisco), we decided to use one of the recipes in that book for Sopa de Ajo – Garlic Soup. It’s similar to the challenge recipe for Sopa Castellana, but without the ham or red peppers.

The bread:

The rich chicken stock:

One whole head of garlic (!), chopped and fried:

And the assembled soup, cooking on the stovetop. We used smoked paprika instead of regular sweet paprika, because we like that smoky flavor.

Optionally served with an egg yolk (see top of page), the soup was rich and delicious, but boy was it garlicky! Probably not the thing to make when you have a client meeting the next day. (Oh wait… one of us did have a client meeting the next day…)

Thanks, Begoña, for a delicious and different challenge!