Intensely Flavored Mushroom Barley Soup

Most mushroom barley soup recipes rely heavily on tomatoes for taste. This one doesn’t. In this version, the mushrooms are the star of the show. And the result is stunning comfort food, perfect for cold weather. That’s why I call it Intensely Flavored Mushroom Barley Soup.

It’s vegetarian too. Vegan, in fact. But when you taste it, you’ll be surprised that it doesn’t contain any beef. Inspired by a Mark Bittman recipe, appropriately entitled, Beefy Soup Without the Beef, it is hearty enough for a main course. 

With lots of different vegetables and just a hint of tomato taste, it will warm you up as it nourishes you, body and soul. 

The key to its “mushroominess” is the combination of dried and fresh mushrooms. Although dried mushrooms are expensive, a little goes a long way. Reconstituted in boiling water, they provide both a nice mushroom flavor and aroma. 

If you blanch at my silly term, “mushroominess,” go for the sophisticated explanation – umami. It’s the fifth taste, after sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. This soup gets its umami from soy sauce as well as from lots of mushrooms. By the way, if you’re interested in umami, check out the fascinating Umami Information Center. 

You can increase the amount of dried mushrooms, but I wouldn’t lower it to less than the specified 1/2 ounce. Also, I’ve tried it with both dried portobello (portabella) and porcini mushrooms- both work fine. Dried mushooms are rather expensive for a vegetable. If cost is a big issue, it would be worth considering dried shiitakes. They are less expensive than dried porcini and portobello (portabella) mushrooms. As a common ingredient in Asian dishes, they may also be easier to find than the two other varieties. According to a Cook’s Illustrated taste test, dried shiitakes taste meatier but less mushroomy than their porcini counterparts.  One site that compared shiitakes to portobello (portabella) describes the former as smokier in taste. 

Bittman uses a ratio of 1 ounce of dried porcini mushrooms to 1/4 pound of fresh in his mushroom barley soup. The first time I made my own version, I found inexpensive bulk portobello (portabella) mushrooms in the bulk section of a store, so I used the full 1.5 ounces. The second time, I found only packaged dried mushrooms, which are more expensive. I cut the quantity of dried mushrooms in half (to 1/2 an ounce) and still got the benefit of the intense flavor and aroma. 

Fresh mushrooms are mostly water. Whether you use common white mushrooms or portobellos, they contain about 90% water. I like to cook them first, before adding the fresh mushrooms to the soup, in order to draw out and concentrate their flavor. But I save the water that leaches out of them as they cook, adding it to the soup as part of the liquid. That way, the fresh mushrooms are tastier and their liquid helps to flavor the broth. 

Barley in soup

• Use either pearl or hulled barley for this soup (or any barley soup or stew.) For the nutrition and taste differences between them, see my earlier post comparing pearl and hulled barley. They’ll use about the same amount of liquid, but pearl barley cooks more quickly. Hulled barley is chewier, at least to me. 
• I’ve specified that the barley cooks in this Intensely Flavored Mushroom Barley soup. That’s the way it’s typically done in most barley soup recipes I’ve seen in cookbooks. But several commenters on my earlier post about pearl and hulled barley pointed out that if you cook the barley separately and add it at the last minute, the soup stays more liquid and doesn’t turn into a stew if you let it sit. Their suggestion doesn’t change the flavor of the soup, because the taste comes from the vegetables, not the barley. Of course, if you want the leftover soup to stay liquid, you have to add the barley on a bowl-by-bowl basis, not all at the end. 

For a mushroom barley soup with less of an intense mushroom taste and more tomatoes, try this version.