Tomato and basil soup is a staple of the end of summer. This soup uses fresh roasted tomatoes to give it a kick in flavor! Serve this along side a grilled cheese for the ultimate comfort food!
Tomato Season
August and September are always filled with the end of/start of new seasons. Kids are going back to school, summer is coming to a close. Fall is just getting started, and the harvest kicks into full swing! For me, this time of year means one more thing... tomato season!
I love tomatoes! They end up in most of the dishes I cook. They're on most of the sandwiches I make. Tomatoes are even great served quartered up with a little bit of cottage cheese for a quick snack! Fresh tomatoes are sweet and a little acidic, which makes them ideal for a comfort food bomb in the form of a roasted tomato soup!
Where do tomatoes come from?
The last few years, I have been trying my hand at gardening. I'm getting pretty good at herbs, but I tried tomatoes and man, did I ever fail! There's a lot to growing different varieties of tomatoes, so I'm very glad that we have farmers all over my state that have much greener thumbs that I do!
I like to wait until the full tomato harvest each year, and then buy up a large stash of tomatoes that I can either can, turn into marinara sauce, or do what we're doing here... make tomato soup! Usually by the full harvest, farmers have so many tomatoes that they are just looking to off load them for very cheap! So, we save some money, and we get a lot of very tasty dishes out of our find!
Roast em up!
Why are we roasting tomatoes? This is going to impart an amazing layer of flavor to our soup! Fresh tomatoes on their own are great! I could throw these directly into a pot diced up and cook them down and it will eventually become soup. But, roasting the tomatoes actually brings out more sweetness, plus we can impart some other flavors into the tomatoes while they roast!
What are we adding? You can add any flavors that you want! What you'll see here is I'm adding some cloves of garlic (I'll say this is probably a must), some sprigs of fresh thyme, and splashing the tops of the tomatoes with a little bit of balsamic vinegar which will add another layer of sweetness and acid!
Mirepoix
Here I go with the fancy French words again! What's mirepoix (meer-uh-poo-ah)? It's the basis of a ton of recipes! Mirepoix is the term for a combination of carrots, celery, and onions. It forms the basis of flavor for a lot if not most of French cuisine, and we see it in Italian cooking as well only it's called "soffritto." And, as we've seen in this recipe, Cajun cuisine uses a modified form of the mirepoix that they refer to as the "trinity" which is celery, onions, and bell pepper.
Now, I'm going to be using fresh ingredients, and I recommend that this is the way you go. BUT, if you're in a hurry, most grocery stores will sell a frozen mirepoix mix in a bag. One bag should be all you need in this recipe!
Blending it up
Now that we have the tomatoes roasted and we've got the mirepoix in the pot cooking, it's time to combine all our pieces together and add some chicken stock! We're going to let all of those flavors get to know each other for about 30 minutes, and then we're down to the final step.
We're going to blend the soup to make it creamy. This can be handled in a few ways. We can add the soup to the blender, in batches if necessary, or to a food processor if there is not a blender. Or, we can use my handy tool, the immersion blender. This is a hand-held device that acts just like the blender, but there's no transferring the soup to a different place! I highly recommend you pick one up! They're not that expensive and they last a long time. Here's a link to mine (https://amzn.to/3cnCUhH). Clicking that link will also help me out, so... try it out!
Wrapping it up
Once the soup is blended up, we're ready to stir in some extra basil, top it with some heavy cream (if you wish), and enjoy! This soup is great all on it's own, but it can also be enjoyed with an amazing grilled cheese sandwich! I love having this soup on a fall evening! It's creamy and comforting like a satin blanket! I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!
Roasted Tomato and Basil Soup
Equipment
- Blender, Food Processor, or Immersion Blender
Ingredients
- 2 lbs fresh tomatoes cored and sliced in half*
- 6 cloves of garlic – peeled
- 4 sprigs of fresh thyme
- 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
- 2 tbsp olive oil - separated
- 2 whole carrots – peeled and diced**
- 3 stalks celery – diced**
- 1 medium yellow onion – diced**
- 3 oz. fresh basil – separated***
- 1 qt. chicken stock
- 1 tsp dried oregano
- 3 bay leaves
- 1 tbsp tomato paste
- 1 tsp crushed red pepper
- 1 ½ tsp heavy cream optional
- Salt to taste
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 400 degrees
- In a foil lined baking tray, spread out tomatoes, garlic, and thyme. Top with salt, balsamic, and 1 tbsp olive oil
- Roast in oven for 40 minutes or until tomatoes are caramelized
- In a large stock pot, add remaining olive oil, onions, carrots, celery, and crushed red pepper and sauté over medium high heat until onions are translucent, and veggies are cooked through. If using frozen vegetables, cut down olive oil by half and cook until mirepoix is soft.
- Add tomato paste to veggies and coat. Cook for 5-8 minutes until mixture turns a rust orange color
- Add roasted tomatoes, garlic, thyme, and dried oregano to stock pot and stir. Add in chicken stock and bring to boil.
- Reduce soup to simmer. Add in bay leave, and one whole bunch of basil, reserving ½ a cup of the leaves for garnish. Simmer for 30 minutes.
- Remove basil bunch and bay leaves. Blend soup until creamy by method of your choice
- Serve soup in bowl adding some of the remaining basil chopped and mixed in and topping with a splash of heavy cream if desired.
- Store leftover soup in a container in the fridge for up to 4 days or freeze in freezer bags for up to 4 months
[…] way to blend this up, though, is the immersion blender. We’ve used one of these before on our tomato soup. The immersion blender I use is here and you can click that picture to buy it and help a blue […]