Best Bets: Apple Soup

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Granny Smith apple soup with cranberry-walnut chutney at The Grove Grill.

I tried Joshua Perkins’ chilled Granny Smith apple soup with cranberry-walnut chutney at the recent March of Dimes Signature Chefs Auction. I thought it was incredibly delicious, and I wasn’t the only one.

A woman who kept eating the soup stood by his station and pulled in about 15 other guests, said Perkins, executive chef at The Grove Grill. She said, “You gotta try this. It’s like crack. You can’t stop.”

Guests downed all eight gallons of the soup Perkins brought to the event.

Perkins and The Grove Grill chef and proprietor Jeffrey Dunham and Perkins had talked about adding a chilled soup to their fare. Perkins wondered how Memphians would react to a cold soup on a fall menu. “As soon as the temperature drops below 60 degrees, they got to wear their fur vests,” he said.

Dunham suggested Perkins try a chilled apple soup recipe he prepared while attending the Culinary Institute of America. Perkins adapted the recipe from “The Professional Chef,” a Culinary Institute of America cookbook. He took out some ingredients and added others. He made the soup thicker and gave it a “little more apple-saucy flavor.” The result was “less dairy, more cooked-down apple,” Perkins said.

His ingredients include cream, apple, white wine, salt, sugar and a little sour cream.

The chutney, he said, is “how I do my cranberries for Thanksgiving.” He uses orange juice, sugar, simple syrup, cranberries, walnuts and Benjamin Prichard’s Double Barreled Bourbon, which is made in Kelso, Tenn.

The soup has been very popular since it was added to the menu two weeks ago, Perkins said. It’s served at lunch and dinner.

I asked Perkins if he’d be offended if I told him the soup reminded me of baby food. Like me, he considers that a good thing. Perkins said his mother served him baby-food apricots while he was growing up. “I ate it out of a jar till I was in college,” he said.

Baby food is taking “a prime ingredient and reducing it down to a paste,” he said.

Perkins likes to “strip down” recipes: “Just take out the extra ingredients. I used to call my cuisine ‘stripped-down classicism’ — just simplifying classic dishes to their core ingredients.”

The Grove Grill, 4550 Poplar; (901) 818-9951.

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