Welcome to the first installment of the Daily’s finest soup column. Whether you are a soup novice or enthusiast, we’re thrilled you’re here. Our passion for soup started when we realized something important: Soup builds community. It warms and nurtures, bringing people together regardless of season and texture. As meals go, soups are quick to make and can be incredibly varied! Soup recipes are easily doubled, tripled and more — perfect for freezing to enjoy at a later date. Making soup tends to require less cooking skill than other dishes. But, with so many soups to choose from, how could you possibly know where to start? That, dear reader, is where we come in. We are your soup shepherds, guiding you as we embark on this journey to broths, bouillions and bisques together.
Without further ado, let’s get souped up.
Our first soup: the classic tomato. This hearty, sweet and tangy accompaniment to a grilled cheese can be found everywhere, from the lunches of 8-year-olds, to little French restaurants to the cans in Andy Warhol’s paintings. Unfortunately, canned tomato soups make the tragic mistake of being terrible — thus necessitating a homemade variety. The recipe we used was the “Easy Tomato Soup Recipe” from Natasha’s Kitchen — ‘easy’ is right in the name! However, we faced some challenges that almost led to our soup’s demise. Read on more, but be forewarned, it got a little messy, and dare we say it, a little dangerous.
Recipe:
We followed the recipe pretty closely, with a few substitutions. We’re both vegetarian, so we used vegetable stock instead of chicken. (Pro tip for other avid soup-makers out there: Instead of constantly buying soup stock, get a jar of ‘Better than Bouillon’ to have on hand whenever you need it. They have both vegetarian and non-vegetarian options!) We also used dried, prechopped basil instead of fresh, and went against the recipe’s recommendation for San Marzano tomatoes in favor of the Stop & Shop-branded variety.
First came prep. Despite the fact that only the yellow onions and garlic needed to be prepared in any way, the process of chopping took an incredibly long time. It might have been the size of our cutting board (small) or the sharpness of our knife (dull) but somehow, we managed to spend 15 minutes just getting our first ingredients ready. After we finished this painful task, we combined the rest of our ingredients into a pot and made the soup base.
Next up: blending. The most eventful part of the process, blending our ingredients truly tested our mettle as chefs. We couldn’t find an immersion blender, and as panic started to swell in our chests, we were relieved to discover the kitchen’s NutriBullet. It’s a small blender mostly meant to be used for smoothies (i.e. something chilled and unlikely to burn your hands if it leaks — unlike, say, tomato soup freshly taken from the pot). A NutriBullet was certainly not the ideal mode of combining; however, our determination for soup held steady and we soldiered on.
Our process went like this: Scoop the chunky tomato soup from the pot; place it into the NutriBullet container and secure the top (only semi-successfully); flip the container upside down on top of the blender; blend, praying that the container was tightly sealed (it was often not); then pour the blended soup into our second pot.
Readers, you may be thinking: ‘Wow, Arghya and Emily, that sounds messy, and honestly pretty dangerous for spilling scalding soup on yourselves.’ If you assumed that, you would be correct. At the end of the process, Emily had been splattered with enough red to feature as an extra in an ’80s slasher — but finally the soup was done and ready for garnish.
Reflections:
Although the journey tested us, the destination did not disappoint. While basic, this tomato soup absolutely delivers on what it promises: It was creamy, rich and paired great with a bit of bread. Arghya would like to note that it could have been a lot spicier.
But taste is not the only factor that makes a soup good — we must analyze the process of making it. While not incredibly complicated, most of the ingredients in this soup aren’t easily substituted, and the need for heavy cream is likely going to warrant a trip to the store. No specialized equipment was necessary, as the soup essentially requires only a cutting board and a pot (or two). However, an immersion blender would have made blending much, much easier. The time to cook was not long, and even when chopping ingredients inefficiently, this soup can be made in an hour or less.
