Pixelated Crumb

The next recipe in the lineup from our week-long celebration of Rick Bayless is a wonderful, creamy corn soup.  In the recipe, Bayless says that you can use either chicken or ham and ham just seemed like an obvious choice to me.  Of course chicken would work wonderfully, but I really liked the idea of some yummy, well-seasoned ham with the mellower corn flavor.

My favorite part of this soup, however, is not the ham, it’s the poblano chile.  It gives the soup a lovely mild spice that hits at the back of your tongue.  You roast the chile first, giving it a smoky kick. Spice-phobes need not be afraid – it has a very mild kick.

The ham isn’t particularly healthy, but there’s not that much and this soup recipe is much healthier than a more traditional corn chowder.  The soup is thickened with corn starch and uses milk instead of cream (we used 1% and it worked well).  I also learned from Joseph that since calcium is a mineral and cooking doesn’t alter minerals, it still has all the calcium content as if you had just chugged all that milk instead of putting it in the soup.  I’m not a huge fan of a lot of healthy dairy products like milk and yogurt (ice cream and brie, on the other hand, are a completely different story) and I know I don’t get enough calcium most days so I felt totally validated eating this soup.  Veggies and calcium!

I wasn’t quite sure what to serve with the soup.  A salad would obviously go nicely, but I was looking for a bread.  My first thought was cornbread, but that just seemed like way too much corn to me.  We ended up making an old-fashioned sesame-wheat bread in the bread machine.  The toasty flavor from the sesame seeds played nicely off of the smoky roasted poblano in the soup.

Creamy Corn Soup with Ham and Poblanos

Adapted from Everyday Mexican