Tomato soup

The problem with homemade tomato soup is that you are eternally comparing your efforts to the gold standard of Heinz, the most popular of any canned soup on the market, and deservingly so – it’s delicious. But it’s also chock full of salt, sugar and goodness knows how many stabilisers and e-numbers.

So it’s worth finding a homemade version that tastes as good but is genuinely made from at least four of your 5-a-day, and is also a good use of your surplus tomato crop.

I think I have found such a recipe, which recreates the sweetness of the canned version by slow roasting the tomatoes and onions to produce a natural caramelisation, before the final cooking stage.

The recipe is based on one I found on https://www.dontgobaconmyheart.co.uk/roasted-tomato-soup-fresh-tomatoes/ with a few substitutions.

Ingredients

For 4 helpings;

1kg/2.2lbs fresh tomatoes

1 medium white onion

3-4 cloves of garlic (skin on) – optional, I have fussy eaters in my family who can be ambivalent about garlic so I left it out.

1 stick of celery

1 medium carrot

1 tbsp butter

1 tbsp tomato puree

handful of chopped fresh basil leaves (again optional – I left it out of the actual soup mix, ref my earlier comment about fussy eaters, but sprinkled a handful over the finished soup to serve)

240 ml stock (chicken or vegetable – I used the turkey stock I had made and frozen at Easter)

salt and pepper to taste

olive oil

Method

1 Rinse your tomatoes then slice and lay them cut side uppermost in a large shallow pan.
2. Sprinkle them with salt and pepper and a drizzle of olive oil. If you’re adding garlic, tuck a few whole cloves, skin on, around the tomatoes.

3. Turn the tomatoes over – face down.

4. Pop them in a medium oven (around 180c) for about 30 mins, until the skins just start to char

5. Meanwhile chop the onion, celery and carrot and fry them very gently (for about 20 mins) in the butter, until again you see some slight charring occur.

6. Tip the roasted tomatoes and the caramelised onion, celery and carrot into a saucepan, peel the skin off the roasted garlic cloves and add them and the chopped basil (if you’re using these) and stock, and simmer with the lid on for about 30 mins.

7. Liquidise the soup using a hand blender or a mixer with a blade.

8. If you like your soup a bit chunky then you can serve it like this or you can push it through a sieve to remove the pips and any bits of tomato skin.

9. Serve with a drizzle of cream and a few chopped basil leaves

10. This soup also freezes well if you want to double or treble the quantities and make use of your tomato glut.

If you have a go at making it I’d love to hear how you get on. Let me know in the comments section below.