Hairy Bikers tomato soup with fresh tomatoes is one swap away from the tinned original, a kilo of ripe tomatoes replacing two tins. The recipe is Cream of Tomato Soup from Mums Still Know Best, with onion, garlic, dried herbs and double cream. It serves four at about 290 calories a bowl, and takes just over an hour.
They write in Mums Still Know Best that this was Dave’s Saturday lunch as a boy, tinned soup with fried cheese sandwiches. They still make it, and they say it is far better done at home. Fresh tomatoes are the next step along from that.
Skins and seeds are the one thing to deal with. A tin has neither, but a kilo of fresh tomatoes has plenty, and a stick blender spins the skins around rather than breaking them down. Push the soup through a sieve after blending and it comes out silky instead of gritty.
Hairy Bikers Tomato Soup with Fresh Tomatoes
Description
Thirty five minutes of simmering does the work here, cooking the fresh tomatoes down until they thicken and darken. Tomato purée replaces the concentration a tin would have brought. This Hairy Bikers tomato soup with fresh tomatoes is then blended, sieved and finished with double cream.
Ingredients
Instructions
- Soften the onions: Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add the onions and garlic, then fry gently for 5 minutes until they start to soften.
- Add the tomatoes: Stir in the chopped tomatoes and the tomato purée. Cook for 5 minutes, pressing the tomatoes down as they collapse.
- Add the liquid: Pour in the water and add the dried herbs, 1 teaspoon of sugar, a good pinch of salt and plenty of black pepper.
- Simmer: Bring to a gentle simmer and cook for 35 minutes, stirring now and then, until the soup has thickened and darkened.
- Blend: Take the pan off the heat and blitz with a stick blender until as smooth as you can get it.
- Sieve: Push the soup through a sieve into a clean pan, pressing with the back of a ladle. Throw away the skins and seeds left behind.
- Finish: Stir in the cream and warm through. Taste, and add the second teaspoon of sugar if the tomatoes need it.
FAQs
How many fresh tomatoes replace a tin?
About 450g of fresh for each 400g tin, so two tins become roughly a kilo. That is the figure the conversion charts give, and it is a starting point rather than the whole answer.
Cooks who do this often go higher. One well-rated recipe puts 2kg of fresh against two large tins, a quarter more again. Tinned tomatoes are picked ripe and already cooked down, so fresh ones need both the extra weight and the longer simmer to catch up.
Which tomatoes should I buy?
Ripe ones, and the redder the better. Plum and vine tomatoes hold more flesh and less water than salad tomatoes, so you get a thicker soup from the same kilo.
Pale supermarket tomatoes are the usual problem. Leave them on a sunny windowsill for two days if you have time, or reach for the second teaspoon of sugar if you do not. Variety matters as much here as it does in their parsnip and apple soup, where only Bramleys will do.
Why is there tomato purée in it as well?
Because a tin brings concentration that fresh tomatoes do not. The fruit in a tin is picked at peak ripeness and cooked before sealing, so a lot of water has already gone.
Two tablespoons of purée put that depth back and keep the colour deep red rather than pale orange. Without it the soup tastes thinner than you expect, even after 35 minutes on the hob. Their carrot and coriander soup solves the same problem differently, by packing in far more vegetable per litre.
How does this compare with their other tomato soups?
There are four across the books, and every one of them starts with a tin. Mums Still Know Best is the cream of tomato, which is the one used here.
Make It Easy has a tomato and basil soup at 122 calories, built on two tins with a bunch of basil and a little single cream. Veggie Feasts turns it spicy with a Moroccan version, and Ultimate Comfort Food drops cheesy dumplings straight into the pan. This fresh version is the richest of the lot.
Can I leave the cream out?
You can, and it saves about 135 calories a bowl. The soup comes out sharper and more tomato-forward, which plenty of people prefer.
For body without the cream, blend in a slice of white bread with the crusts cut off, which is the old Spanish trick. Their mushroom soup uses milk and flour to the same end, and a splash of milk works here too.
