A proper New England chowder is built on two things that are almost pure fat: the bacon or salt pork that starts the pan, and the double cream that finishes it. Between them they account for most of the roughly 20 g of fat in a standard bowl. The clams, the potatoes and the onion contribute almost none of it.
Take both out without thinking and you get thin, pale soup. This version replaces each of them with something that does the same job — and comes in at 3 g of fat a bowl.
Why This Version Works
The bacon is doing two things at once: it renders fat to cook the aromatics in, and it brings smoke. Only the smoke is actually necessary. A teaspoon of smoked paprika bloomed in the hot pan for half a minute gives you the same savoury smokiness for a rounding error in fat, and the aromatics will soften perfectly well in a spoonful of the clam juice.
The cream is doing something different: it is providing body and it is providing the mouth-coating that makes a chowder feel like a chowder. Those are separable too. Body comes from starch — a cupful of the cooked potatoes crushed and stirred back in thickens the pot more honestly than a roux ever did, because it tastes of the soup rather than of flour. Mouthfeel comes from evaporated skimmed milk, which is milk with most of its water removed, so it carries the concentrated milk proteins and sugars that read as creaminess without the butterfat.
The cornflour is there for insurance and for shine. Slurried into cold milk first, never dropped into the hot pan, it gives the chowder the slight gloss that tells your eye it is rich.
One last thing: a teaspoon of vinegar at the end. Fat normally carries and rounds off flavour; without it a soup can taste oddly flat even when it is well seasoned. Acid does that rounding job instead, and nobody will be able to tell you why the bowl tastes finished.
Honest comparison: the bacon-and-double-cream version runs about 20 g of fat a serving. This one runs 3 g.
Ingredients
- 2 x 280 g tins of baby clams in their juice (or 700 g fresh clams, steamed and shelled, liquor strained and kept)
- 600 g waxy potatoes, peeled and cut into 1.5 cm dice
- 1 onion, finely chopped
- 2 celery ribs, finely chopped
- 2 tsp olive oil
- 500 ml clam juice and low-sodium fish or chicken stock combined
- 400 ml evaporated skimmed milk
- 2 tbsp cornflour (cornstarch)
- 1 tsp smoked paprika
- 2 bay leaves and 1 tsp fresh thyme leaves
- 1 tsp cider vinegar
- salt and plenty of black pepper
- chopped parsley and a few oyster crackers to serve
Serves 6.
Instructions
- Drain the clams over a jug and keep every drop of the juice; top it up with stock to 500 ml. Set the clams aside.
- Put the onion, celery and oil into a heavy pan over medium heat with 3 tbsp of the liquid. Cook for 8 minutes until soft, adding a splash more whenever the pan dries. Stir in the smoked paprika and thyme and give it 30 seconds — this is the step that stands in for bacon, so do not skip it.
- Add the potatoes, the bay leaves and the rest of the clam juice and stock. Bring to a simmer and cook for 12–14 minutes, until the potatoes are tender at the edges but not falling apart.
- Lift out about a cupful of the potatoes with a slotted spoon, crush them to a paste against the side of a bowl and stir them back in. That is the body of the chowder, and it is where a traditional recipe would have used a butter roux.
- Whisk the cornflour into 4 tbsp of the cold evaporated milk until smooth, then stir it into the pan along with the rest of the milk. Bring it back to a bare simmer, stirring, for 3–4 minutes until it thickens enough to coat a spoon. Do not let it boil hard; evaporated milk is stable, but a rolling boil will still catch on the base.
- Add the clams and heat them through for no more than two minutes. Clams toughen almost instantly past that point, which is the single most common thing to get wrong in a chowder.
- Pull out the bay leaves. Stir in the vinegar, taste, and season hard with black pepper. Rest it off the heat for five minutes before serving, with parsley and a few crackers.
Nutrition
Fat: 3 g · Saturated fat: 0.9 g · Calories: 215 kcal · Protein: 16 g · Fibre: 2 g · Carbs: 28 g · Serves: 6 · Prep: 20 min · Cook: 30 min
Figures are per serving, one sixth of the pot. Clams are one of the leanest sources of protein there is — a serving here carries 16 g of protein for well under a gram of fat from the shellfish itself. Most of the fat in the bowl is the two teaspoons of oil. Use full-fat evaporated milk instead of skimmed and the figure roughly triples.
Variations
- Manhattan style: leave out the milk and cornflour entirely, add a 400 g tin of chopped tomatoes with the stock. Drops to about 2 g of fat a serving.
- Corn chowder: swap the clams for 300 g of sweetcorn and use vegetable stock. Blend a third of the pot for extra body.
- Smoked haddock: 400 g of undyed smoked haddock, poached in the milk and flaked in at the end, in place of the clams. Skip the paprika.
- Thicker still: crush half the potatoes rather than a cupful. No extra fat, noticeably more substantial.
Storing and Reheating
It keeps for three days in the fridge and tastes better on the second day, once the smoke and thyme have settled into it. Reheat it gently and never let it boil, or the clams go rubbery and the milk can catch. It thickens considerably when cold; loosen it with stock rather than water. Chowder with potatoes in it does not freeze well — the dice go grainy — so make what you will eat.
What to Serve It With
A hunk of plain bread and a green salad is all it needs. If you want to keep the whole plate low in fat, skip the buttered roll and use a crusty sourdough; and check your oyster crackers, which are often made with palm oil and can quietly add 3 or 4 g of fat to a bowl you worked hard to keep lean.
Questions People Ask
Are tinned clams good enough?
Yes, and for a weeknight they are the sensible choice. The juice in the tin is a real ingredient — it is most of the seafood flavour in the pot, so never pour it away. If you use fresh clams, steam them in a little water, strain the liquor carefully to leave the grit behind, and use that in place of the tinned juice.
Why did my clams go rubbery?
They were cooked too long. Tinned clams are already cooked; they need two minutes in a hot pot and no more. Add them at the very end, off the main heat if necessary, and remember that reheating leftovers is a second cooking too, which is why the chowder should only ever be warmed through.
Will the milk curdle?
Evaporated skimmed milk is much more stable than fresh milk or single cream because it has been heat-treated already, but it will still split if you boil it hard or add acid to it while it is very hot. Keep the pot at a bare simmer and stir the vinegar in at the end, off the heat.
Can I make it dairy-free?
Use 400 ml of unsweetened oat milk reduced by a quarter in a separate pan, and increase the cornflour to 3 tbsp. Oat milk has the starch to carry body better than almond or rice milk. Fat stays at about 3 g a serving.
— Sophia
Written by
Sophia W. Whitman
Recipe developer and author of the Pancreatitis Diet Cookbook for Beginners. Cooking has been my life’s work, and low-fat cooking is the corner of it I know best. Every recipe here lists fat per serving, so you don’t have to guess.