Ah, tomatoes!
Plump, ripe, juicy, red tomatoes. Imagine yourself biting into one right now – the juice oozing down your chin, and the deeply delicious tomato flavor bursting onto your taste buds.
Are you salivating yet?
How about now? Because this soup is chock full of tomato deliciousness.
It was a totally tomato weekend back when I threw this extravagantly rich tomato-fest together for you. While I was reading labels on cans of tomato purée – with this soup in mind – I got inspired to make those Tomato Basil Biscuits you see in that picture. That same weekend I also conjured up the very popular Tomato Salad Soup aka How To Eat Salad Greens Without Having To Eat Salad Greens. I also learned which sun-dried tomatoes, which tomato paste, and which tomato purée brands are unsweetened. Always good to know. Now I’ll never have to read those labels again. Yay!
I loved tomato soup when I was a kid; even though the tomato soup I grew up on came out of a packet. Looking back I realize how odd that is, since my mother made almost everything from scratch. Except soups, and a few other things like these crazy packet puddings called Angel Delight which I thought were completely magical. I dread to think what was in them – you added milk and whisked it up and put it in bowls and 30 minutes later it was thick and fluffy like a mousse. I loved Angel Delight, especially the butterscotch flavor. I could barely wait for the 30 minutes to be up so I could eat it. It used to set like cement in my stomach, but my mouth was so happy I didn’t care. Yikes.
The packet soup I ate as a young ‘un was mixed with water and heated; yet somehow I enjoyed it. It bears no resemblance to real tomato soup – you know – tomato soup with real, live tomatoes in it. This recipe is like tomato soup on super-steroids in comparison. In America it seems that eating Campbell’s Tomato Soup is a requirement for a happy life. This recipe ain’t nothing like Campbell’s, either. If you think that Campbell’s tastes “Mmm, mmm….good!”, just wait until you get your first spoonful of this down your gullet.
Then come back and talk to me about “Mmm, mmm….good!”
- 2 cups / 1 pint chicken or clear vegetable stock
- 7 oz. / 200g celery, roughly chopped
- 6 oz. / 170g tomato purée / paste
- 2 lb / 900g plum tomatoes, roughly chopped
- 3 tsp dried basil
- 3 TBSP dry white wine
- 6 TBSP 2% Greek yogurt
- 3 oz / 85g spinach
- 1 tsp guar gum
- Sea salt and pepper to taste
- Place stock, celery, tomato paste, and tomatoes in a saucepan and bring to the boil.
- Simmer for 10 minutes until the tomatoes and celery are very soft.
- In batches, put the vegetables in a blender and blend until very smooth.
- Pour the soup into a bowl while you blend the remaining vegetables.
- To the last batch of vegetables in the blender, add the basil, wine, Greek yogurt, and spinach.
- Blend just until the spinach has disappeared.
- While blender is running, remove center piece of blender lid and shake in the guar gum.
- Stop blending immediately and transfer last batch of soup into the saucepan.
- Add rest of soup to the pan.
- Season to taste and reheat if necessary before serving.
Fi the choccy beaverHi Carrie. Just wanted to share a cheats tomato soup I made on a hot summer night in England this week. As a single working mum, quick SANE food needs to be ultra easy sometimes, thus my chilled Tom soup!
1 tin chopped tomatoes in their juices, blended roughly with some vanilla whey powder (about 1 scoop?), dried basil to taste, plus optional silken tofu blended in for extra protein if required.
Yeah, sounds weird but it was like an almost-Heinz cream of tomato, without the need for cream or sugar!! Mmmmm….
Andrea M.Absolutely fabulous tomato soup! I’ll never miss the butter or half-and-half from my regular recipe. I confess I did have to add one tablespoon of raw sugar to the whole batch, only because I like my tomato soup just a little bit sweet. Thanks for another great recipe, Carrie! 🙂
carrieHi Andrea – glad you are loving the soups! Can you replace the sugar with the same amount of xylitol to get the same sweet effect without the bad stuff?
TonyAmazing! Every time I make a recipe from this site, I laugh with joy when I first taste it. And this soup was hilarious. Carrie, you’ve excelled yourself. Even with my old useless blender, my way too thick home made Greek yoghurt, and my total lack of ability in the kitchen (I’m getting there though), this soup was incredible. My wife will be home in an hour and I just know she’ll ask me how much I paid the chef.
Carrie, for providing amazing SANE recipes and making a complete incompetent look great in the kitchen, “go raibh míle maith agat” (thank you a thousand times).
carrieTony – your comment made me smile as wide as the ocean! THANK YOU!!!!
EstherHi Carrie,
I love your writing, and miss you on the podcasts – as a matter of fact, I no longer listen to them.
I also enjoy the recipes and appreciate the addition of metric weights.
But not this time… 2 lb tomatoes converted to 200 (two hundred) gr.? More like 900 (nine hundred) gr. is what it should be…
carrieOh my gosh Esther – you are so right. Corrected! Thank you, thank you!
MIke ticklePossibly one of my favourite soups – and it freezes/reheats well so is ideal for making batches and freezing for work lunches. I’ve taken to adding a bit of finely chapped chorizo to it for variation.
JamesHi Carrie,
What I usually struggle with with soups is to find a sane chicken stock. Those little cubes contain sugar, liquid stock and broth often contain dextrin, etc.
What do you recommend? Is making your own the only viable option?
carrieHi James – not sure where you are located. In the US I buy my liquid stock from Trader Joe’s. You are right that stock cubes can contain all sorts of stuff. I sometimes use Rapunzel brand powdered stock (in jar not cube). Home made is best in terms of purity, flavor, and ‘body’ – it has a richness that you just don’t find in store stock, -but it is pretty impractical for most people especially in soup season where one pot of soup can take 2 pints of sock. Hope that helps, somewhat?!
JamesHi Carrie,
Sorry for the late reply and thank you for your response.
Unfortunately this doesn’t help me that much. For now I am using cubes and might experiment with making me own at some point. The liquid stock that I have found almost contains sugar as well so because of that I didn’t bother with that as it is more expensive and probably isn’t that much better in the end.
I recently moved to Antwerp in Belgium and have some problems locating all ingredient for a sane lifestyle. Even baby spinach is a problem where I was super easy to find when I was living in San Francisco. And so that is why I started making more soups instead of smoothies, but encountered the challenge of finding sane chicken or vegetable stock.