Creamy Mushroom Soup with Crunchy Croutons

First and foremost, for the white mushroom puree soup, we need to deal with the mushrooms. Soak the dried mushrooms in water. Of course, you can exclude dried mushrooms, but it is known that they greatly enhance the mushroom flavor, so it definitely won't harm our soup. If you have fresh mushrooms, you need to sort them, rinse thoroughly with cold water, and then cook in water with salt (usually mushrooms are cooked for about an hour). If you are using frozen porcini mushrooms (which I did in this recipe), you need to defrost them first and let the liquid drain. Now we can start the main cooking process. The soup is prepared quickly if we combine some actions. The dried mushrooms are already soaked. Peel the potatoes. Cut the potatoes into arbitrary pieces, fill with water, and add the soaked mushrooms. Cook until done.

Meanwhile, peel the onion, slice it into half rings. The size of the onion slices is not critical, as everything will be pureed later.

Preheat a frying pan, melt a piece of butter, add onions to the butter and fry until golden.

Next, add mushrooms to the frying pan and cook for 15 minutes.

Now, place potatoes (remove the dried mushrooms, as they have already released their flavors, do not drain the broth in which the potatoes were cooked, we will adjust the thickness of the soup with mushroom broth) and mushrooms with onions in a blender bowl, and finely grind everything until the mixture becomes homogeneous.

Pour the resulting potato-mushroom mixture into a pot, add oregano, season with salt and pepper to taste. At this stage, pour in the cream, stir, bring to a boil, and cook for another 5 minutes. If the soup is too thick, add the reserved potato-mushroom broth.

Dryly toast thinly sliced baguette on a dry frying pan, lightly sprinkle with olive oil. Serve the white mushroom puree soup warm with crunchy croutons. Optionally, add a spoonful of sour cream to the soup. Enjoy your meal!