Tomato Soup

From the book The Basic Gourmet by Diane Morgan, Dan Taggart, Kathleen Taggart, and Georgia Vareldzis

Introduction

This recipe is what real tomato soup should taste like. Most of us grew up on cream of tomato soup coming out of a red-and-white-labeled can. We think you will be wonderfully surprised when you taste the difference—it made us all want to have the soup in a mug, in front of a glowing hot fire. For a casual dinner with friends, make a salad, buy some hearty bread, and enjoy a bowl of soup. For a low-fat variation, substitute plain low-fat yogurt for the cream. The yogurt gives the soup a wonderfully tangy quality.

Ingredients

Steps

1. Using a heavy 3½- to 4-quart saucepan, heat olive oil over medium heat for about 30 seconds. Add onion and garlic and sauté for 5 minutes. (Turn down heat if onion and garlic are browning.) Add chicken broth and tomatoes with their liquid. Turn up heat until the liquids begin to boil. Now turn down heat so that soup just simmers and cook uncovered for 15 minutes. Remove from heat and cool slightly.
2. Puree soup in batches in a blender. You will need a bowl to hold the pureed soup while you are completing the batches. Pour all of the pureed soup back in the pan and add cream or yogurt, salt, sugar, and pepper. Stir to blend the soup, and taste. Heat the soup, but do not let it boil. Serve in mugs or bowls. This soup keeps well up to 1 week, tightly covered in the refrigerator.

Notes

• We hauled out a 13-year-old avocado-green blender to puree this soup! Fancy equipment is not required. We actually prefer to use a blender for this particular task because we tend to overfill a food processor, which results in soup leaking out of the bottom of the container when it is removed from the base of the machine!
• Basil is often added to canned peeled Italian pear tomatoes, but that’s OK for this recipe.

This content is from the book The Basic Gourmet by Diane Morgan, Dan Taggart, Kathleen Taggart, and Georgia Vareldzis.