Week 36: Hot and Cold - Black Bean Soup with Sour Cream and Shredded Cheese [Cooking]

Intro from Cooking Challenge: Contrasting flavors are an important part of any cook’s bag of tricks. Think of how much a pot of tomato sauce can really shine with a little sugar added, or a dish like sweet and sour pork has those layers of different flavors that stack on top of each other to create something greater than the sum of its parts. We can apply the same ideas to temperature contrast, and that’s exactly what we’re here to do for hot and cold week. This doesn’t necessarily have to be high-concept – a favorite meal of mine is barbecued pulled pork sandwiches with coleslaw, where you have not only the hot/cold contrast but also the smoky barbecue/piquant coleslaw flavor contrast. Many top chefs use hot and cold contrast to create unique dishes – Heston Blumenthal, for example is famous for creating drinks that are hot on one side, and cold on the other (and here’s how to do it). Hot and cold contrasts can also be used in desserts. The two most famous examples of this are baked Alaska and bananas foster.

As soon as I saw this week's challenge, I knew I wanted to make black been soup. The combination of hot bean soup with a dollop of cool sour cream turns the whole thing into a silky bowl of delicious.

I made the soup from scratch following this recipe and then garnished with a generous blob of sour cream and a shredded blend of Mexican cheese.