Roasted Tomato Soup

 

 

 

 

On Friday, I roasted a big tray of tomatoes in addition to the pumpkin.  One of my favorite uses for my garden tomatoes is in Roasted Tomato Soup.  I found the recipe in Gourmet several years ago, although it looks like they recently published it again as the link will show.  Because the tomatoes are roasted the flavors are concentrated and the tomatoes become very sweet.  You could actually use a good on-the-vine supermarket tomato in this recipe, too.  The only "hard" part of the recipe is that you need to run the soup through a sieve to remove any large pieces of seed or skin but that only takes a couple of minutes.  Make sure you do it though or you’ll be sorry!  Other than that this soup is very simple. 

 

 

 

 

 

Although I normally use a red tomato, for this go-round I used Golden Rave tomatoes – my plant has been especially abundant this summer and on Friday I’d just picked another huge bowl of them.  This summer was the first time I’d planted them but they will be back in my garden again next year.  Golden Rave is a yellow, plum-style tomato.  They are medium-sized and fairly meaty.   They gave the soup a gorgeous golden color. 

 

Once you’ve made the recipe you’ll see it’s easy to customize it with your own ideas.  I use different herbs, sometimes add smoked paprika or other spices, occasionally add different vegetables (I’ll roast a few peppers along with the tomatoes, for instance).  And, the recipe calls for heavy cream, which makes a delicious soup, but I sometimes leave it out altogether or substitute 1% or whole milk.  I often make the soup up to the place where you add the cream and keep that base in the refrigerator.  Then I’ll just scoop out a bowl or two’s worth of the base, add a couple of splashes of milk or cream and heat that up for my lunch. 

 

 

 

 

 

The normal garnish for this soup is a Parmesan wafer (recipe linked to from the soup recipe).  The wafers are really delicious – even on their own with a glass of wine – and look beautiful on the red version of this soup.  This weekend I  made the wafers and ate them along with my soup but because they are golden they just blended in with the soup and didn’t look good as a garnish.  So for the photos I decided to try something new.  I used a slice of fresh mozzarella, topped with a slice of red tomato and a little sprig of thyme, since I’d used thyme in the soup.  I loved the contrast for the photo but even better the mozzarella melted a little into the soup and the freshness of the sliced tomato in contrast to the warm, roasted flavor of the soup was really good! 

 

If you are looking for a meal that is great for the changing of the seasons – combining summer’s flavors into a cozy fall dish – I highly recommend this soup. 

 

You can find the recipe here.