It’s been a while since I’ve covered something out of Group 03: Soups on here–the last one was 3-14: Creamy Corn Chowder back in January. 3-20: Italian Tomato Soup is pretty simple when it comes to ingredients…and flavor. I ended up inadvertently turning my batch into what was essentially Spaghetti-Os, but even that wasn’t terrible.
This soup is pretty basic–Simply Delicious has you add a bit of cream to make it more of a bisque-type tomato soup. If it’s not tomato season, no worries–you can make this with canned tomatoes too. 🍅
This soup comes so close to being vegan/dairy-free/gluten-free, but the flour & cream ruin it. I suspect you could get away with omitting the cream and flour and thickening instead with a cornstarch slurry, which would make those adjustments without sacrificing a ton of flavor/texture. Something to think about.
Ingredients. Subbed out coconut milk for whipping cream (another alternative to the cornstarch slurry method I mentioned above), which works well with tomato/sweet things. I also decided to add some alphabet noodles to the soup, envisioning something like this being the result.
Chopped onions tossed into the pot. I chopped them pretty large because I had plans to run the whole thing through the blender to get a smooth texture. That’s not part of the recipe, but I prefer smooth tomato soup over chunky.
Soft onions tossed and browned with the whole wheat flour.
Added in the tomatoes & broth.
Added in the seasonings.
Bay leaves are riding the top of the boiling soup. This is where I decided to pull the soup off the heat and run it through the blender. That wasn’t a pretty process (and isn’t part of the recipe), so we’ll just imagine it in our minds. I did pull the bay leaves out before blending the soup, though.
See? Here they are, atop the soup in their rightful place.
Added in my alphabet noodles raw, thinking they would cook in the soup. Here’s where I messed up–it made the soup too starchy. If I did it again, I’d cook the noodles first separately, rinse them off, and then add them to the soup.
Final product–the starchiness of the pasta made the soup more sauce-like, and therefore the whole thing ended up tasting like Spaghetti-Os. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it was not the intended result.
Grade: B
