Un-Red Roasted Tomato Soup
Most tomato soup tastes like spaghetti sauce mixed with broth. Sometimes even really good spaghetti sauce mixed with broth, but still.
This is something else altogether.
Why? Because it uses only fresh tomatoes, with no tomato paste and no canned tomatoes. In fact, the color of the soup comes out more orange than red. I admit, when I first made it, I was disappointed that my tomato soup didn’t look like Warhol’s Campbell’s iconography. What is tomato soup if not red?
What is it? Good. Light on your belly. Not acidic. Soothing. Sweet. Nuanced.
However, to make sure I wasn’t fooling myself, I did a taste test. I made two versions of the exact same recipe, one with fresh Roma tomatoes and the other with really good canned ones, and I called my neighbors Judy and Martin.
Judy and Martin are upright professionals, a lawyer and a doctor respectively. But I have a feeling that before parenthood, they each took a few rides on the magic bus. In the past, when my late-night parties woke up their kids, this lovely couple asked only if I’d had a good time. No complaints issued. I think they may have wanted to be invited over for an un-parental puff.
Anyway, I brought over the two soups, each one poured over a piece of crusty bread and doused with excellent olive oil. I watched and waited and did everything in my power to keep my mouth shut while they tasted. The results were interesting: both Martin and Judy initially gravitated towards the red canned variety. But then Martin started reconsidering. “This one is growing on me. Judy, try it again,” he said, as he continued to shovel spoonfuls of the fresh tomato soup into his mouth. “It doesn’t grab you at first, because it’s not the tomato soup you expect.”
He was right. Its goodness is in its subtlety. Judy soon followed suit and the red version was left alone. Their kids, lured from their homework dungeons by the commotion, were thrilled to participate in the food war. To my surprise, both boys immediately chose the Un-Red Roasted Tomato Soup.
And thus, so have I.
P.S. This soup tastes like the Tuscan pappa al pomodoro, which is a tomato bread soup. In alignment with my California approach to eating, we are only adding one piece of bread per serving. Pappa al pomodoro is made with leftover stale bread, so assuming you don’t have old bread lying around, we will “stale” bread on the oven.
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