BM#4 Day 4: Tomato Soup

Tomato soup is one of the easiest soups to prepare and it is a real comfort food! I am lazy to prepare it from scratch used to buy Lipton tomato soup mix. My father-in-law likes this soup a lot and use to get it whenever he visited us and I slowly got hooked on to it. Sometimes, I even use to drink it for breakfast!  These days, my local grocer is not carrying the instant tomato soup mix and I stopped making tomato soup at home. For the 4th day of the marathon, I made the tomato soup from scratch and you can’t go wrong with this one!  This process involves cooking the tomatoes and then mashing it to make the soup. Another version of the soup is substituting the tomatoes with V8 juice. I will share that recipe very soon. Until then, here is the recipe for the tomato soup from scratch.

Total Time: 25 minutes (includes the time required to cool the pressure cooker)
Preparation: 5 minutes
Cooking Time: 10 minutes
Serves: 2

Ingredients:

• 2 large Vine Ripe Tomatoes sliced or 1 ½ cup sliced Vine Ripe Tomatoes
• ½ medium Onion chopped or ⅓ – ½ cup chopped Onions
• 2 cups Vegetable Stock or Water (if using water, add 2 cloves, 2 cardamom, ¼ “ Cinnamon, 2 Bay Leaves, 2 Pepper Corns, 2-3 Curry Leaves, Few Coriander stems with leaves along with some water)
• 1 tbsp. Cornstarch / Corn Flour + ¼ cup Milk or Water
• ¼ - ½ tsp. Pepper Powder (Adjust to taste)
• ½ tsp. Salt (adjust to taste)

Preparation:

• In a pressure cooker, cook tomatoes, onion and water for 3 whistles. Let the cooker cool and wait for the pressure to release before opening it. Or, cook the tomatoes on stove top until the tomatoes are soft and mushy.
• Mash the tomatoes or blend the mixture using an immersion blender. If you used water instead of stock and added whole spices to the tomatoes before cooking it, remove all the spices. Then blend or mash the tomatoes. Strain the tomato soup and put it back on the stove to boil.
• Mix cornstarch, pepper and salt with some milk or water and add it to the soup. Stir the soup continuously to avoid any  lumps in the soup. Bring it to a boil and cook until the soup thickens. I prefer light, thin soups to thick soups. If you like thick soup, add some extra corn starch to thicken the soup.
• Serve hot with some toasted bread or croutons.

Tip:

• As soon as I added the cornstarch mixture, the soup discolored. I added a small slice of beetroot to the boiling soup and voila, I got back the red color! For a bright red soup, pressure cook the tomatoes with a few pieces of beetroot in step 1. Today I added a small piece to boiling soup when my soup lost its bright red color after adding corn starch.