Le Tourin — A Traditional French Garlic Soup

Wednesday 23 December 2015   —   Category: Cooking & Food

During my culinary adventures this year I have discovered that Wikipedia is a treasure trove of articles about food and cooking. And because so many of the articles are interlinked, learning some­thing new is often only a click away.

There was recently a good example of this when I was reading the Wikipedia article about Gruyère cheese. The article mentions some of the traditional uses of Gruyère, including le tourin, a type of garlic soup from France which is served on dried bread. Because I had never heard of this soup before, I clicked on the link to find out more.

The full name of this soup is Le Tourin d’Ail Doux. In French, ail is garlic, and, depending on the context, doux can have numerous mean­ings. With my ex­pe­ri­ence of French as a second language, I would say that the English word mild is the best translation in this context — mild garlic soup. Some variations of the recipe include diced onions and grated Gruyère cheese. I chose not to include these additional ingredients because it seemed that to do so would make the soup too much like French onion soup. Although I love French onion soup, I was looking for something different, based on garlic without onion.

However, I do love cheese as well! So I came up with my own variation to the recipe. Instead of using chunks of untoasted bread in the soup, I broiled some bread topped with butter, garlic powder and grated Parmesan cheese. This way there was a bit of cheese in the soup, as well as additional garlic taste. I toasted two slices to go in the soup, according to the recipe, and one extra slice for me to eat with the soup.
I prepared an egg as the recipe in­struct­ed. After separating the yolk and the whites, I added a teaspoon of vinegar and some black pepper to the yolk, and then beat both the whites and the yolk.
Here’s the soup after the egg whites have been whisked in. I don’t think I added the egg yolk mixture until after I took this picture.
After cutting the broiled Parmesan-garlic bread into chunks and putting the bread into a bowl, I ladled soup over the bread and garnished it with chives.
The soup was wonderful — my recipe was a great success! And even though it contained six cloves of garlic, it was not too strong, thus living up to its name, ail doux (mild garlic) soup. I’m really look­ing forward to making it again!

If you would like to give my version of Le Tourin d’Ail Doux a try, be sure to download a PDF of my recipe.