Which Tomato Soup Recipe Is Worthy of Your Next Grilled Cheese?
To find the best tomato soup, we tested four popular recipes that use different techniques, including the Instant Pot and roasting fresh tomatoes
Chocolate chip cookies and milk, Buffalo sauce and blue cheese, grilled cheese and tomato soup — these are some of the world’s great pairings. But when it comes to the latter, I’ll admit that I’ve never really had a defined approach: I’ll dump out the contents of whatever canned tomatoes I’ve got on hand and zhuzh it up with some dried herbs and perhaps some dairy. Or more likely, I’ll crack open a can of soup.
That being said, the weather has been dreary and I’ve found myself craving simple food — unchallenging flavors and childhood comforts. What better time to eat tomato soup? When it comes to making it at home, the techniques tend to fall into a few categories: fresh tomatoes or canned, cream or no cream. To figure out what’s worth doing and why, I tested four popular tomato soup recipes around the internet, judging them for ease in both ingredients and technique, and for a balanced, satisfying tomato flavor. Here’s what I found.
Easy Tomato Soup
Natasha Kravchuk, Natasha’s Kitchen
The technique: stovetop-cooked canned tomatoes
An immediate perk of this recipe: It’s full of pantry staples. Kravchuk’s blog dominates Google rankings and her recipe for tomato soup is the top result for the term (for a similar reason, I’ve tested her meatloaf in the past). Kravchuk calls for cooking down onions and garlic, then adding crushed tomatoes, stock, basil, and seasonings. The mixture simmers for just 10 minutes, and then you blend the soup and add heavy cream and a little Parmesan. For testing purposes, I chose to only include heavy cream in this recipe, though it’s listed as “optional” in the Heuck and Laughlin recipes below.
I liked this recipe on a practical level: Tomato soup is typically something I reach for when I want an easy or purely comforting meal, and in both of those instances, I usually don’t want to go to the store for additional ingredients. I almost always, however, have crushed tomatoes, some bouillon, and onions at home. I also appreciated the recipe’s final result: a smooth soup with a no-nonsense tomato flavor. Adding cream to it tempered the acidity slightly and gave the soup a velvety texture. It reminded me of the creamy tomato soup that comes out of a can — which is to say, most of the tomato soup I’ve eaten in my life and my general baseline for tomato soup.
The Best Homemade Tomato Soup
Sarah Fennel, Broma Bakery
The technique: roasted fresh tomatoes
If Kravchuk’s recipe is about being pantry-friendly, Sarah Fennel’s highly ranked recipe is the opposite, in the sense that it relies on fresh tomatoes. The thing about fresh tomatoes at this time of year is that they are sad — pale, stiff, mealy things that make the argument for only eating seasonally. Could roasting them be the fix? Doing so is a popular technique, sometimes also known as “sheet-pan tomato soup” (Ina Garten’s famous recipe also uses the same approach.) To make Fennel’s soup, you roast tomatoes, an onion, and garlic on a sheet pan (it makes your house smell great) before blending them with broth, letting the soup reduce slightly.
My first takeaway, aside from the color, which was more orange than red compared to the other soups I made, was the prominence of the roasted garlic flavor. It reminded me more of the mixture used to make pan con tomate than of classic canned tomato soup. Without adding any cream, the soup had a somewhat watery texture, and started to separate in my spoon when I let it sit for a few minutes. (Would cream have helped this? Perhaps, but Fennel doesn’t call for it.) As for the tomato flavor, I didn’t think roasting made enough of a difference to justify using fresh tomatoes in February, especially when canned tomatoes are cheaper, more reliable, and more concentrated in taste. (3½ pounds of Roma tomatoes ran me about $10; two cans of crushed tomatoes, as used in the previous recipe, cost $6.)
However, I think my assessment of this technique would be very different if I were making this recipe in August and especially if I were a gardener with an excess of tomatoes. But then again, would I really want to make tomato soup in August?
Caramelized Tomato and Shallot Soup
Lidey Heuck, NYT Cooking
The technique: stovetop-cooked fresh tomatoes
Lidey Heuck’s recipe for the New York Times offers some insurance against the bland tomato problem. First, Heuck calls for caramelizing a pound of shallots. Second, she asks that you chop your tomatoes, salt them, and let them sit — a great technique for drawing liquid out of tomatoes and concentrating their flavor. (I’m getting ahead of myself seasonally, but: Always do this before making tomato toast.) Heuck then calls for cooking down the fresh tomatoes with the shallots before adding tomato paste and cooking that down too. All of these steps build flavor. Add water, the drained tomato liquid, basil, then blend and you’ve got tomato soup.
Given the sad state of my tomatoes, I was much more impressed with this recipe than the previous one. The flavor was more nuanced thanks to the deep toastiness of the caramelized shallots, the pronounced herbal sweetness of the basil, and the grounding base note of cooked tomato paste. Even without cream, the texture felt less watery than the previous soup’s, though it was harder to make it fully smooth with my immersion blender. It was a delicious soup, but with 3 pounds of fresh tomatoes, one that still left me wondering how worth-it it really was with winter produce. It’s also worth noting that because of the way you layer the flavors, it felt fussier than other recipes.
Instant Pot Tomato Soup
Jenn Laughlin, Peas and Crayons
The technique: pressure-cooked canned tomatoes
As I learned in a previous recipe test, the Instant Pot can be great for soup, drawing out flavor and texture that would take hours to form on the stove. But while it’s an excellent tool for chicken, which really needs help to break down all that collagen, would it make sense for tomatoes?
This is the question I had when I went into Jenn Laughlin’s recipe, which ranks first for Instant Pot tomato soup recipes online. It’s appealingly simple: Like Kravchuk’s recipe, it begins by sauteeing an onion and garlic (using the Instant Pot’s saute function). Then it calls for tossing in broth, chopped carrots, seasonings, canned tomatoes, and tomato paste. This cooks under high pressure for 15 minutes. Once the pressure is released, you blend the soup.
This soup reminded me a little of pasta sauce. By that I mean that it tasted the most intensely tomatoey and felt the heaviest in both flavor and texture. The carrots lent a subtle sweetness, but since I don’t always have carrots on hand, that slightly dinged the recipe for me. Followed to the letter, it resulted in the thickest soup of the four I tested, though the recipe notes that you can adjust this using more broth or some cream. I liked the final soup and while it didn’t remind me too much of canned tomato soup because of its oomphed-up feel, my taste-test partner considered it the best of the bunch.
Unlike with chicken soup, I don’t know that the Instant Pot made the biggest difference here, but if you tend to keep yours within easy reach, then why not use it?
The winner: Natasha’s Kitchen
On a cost, convenience, and flavor level, I believe that Kravchuk’s recipe is the best choice for most people. Its taste and texture don’t diverge too much from what I think a lot of us expect from tomato soup.
While I liked the flavors of Fennel and Heuck’s takes, I don’t know that the additional effort or the use of fresh tomatoes was worth it in early February. However, I’d keep those techniques in mind for a tomato-heavy summer, especially since tomato soup freezes well.
My final takeaway from trying all of these recipes was that I definitely prefer a tomato soup with some cream and I think the addition certainly improved Kravchuk’s soup. Unless you’re dairy-sensitive, I’d call it a must-add — and the side of grilled cheese, of course, is nonnegotiable.
Soup photo by Bettina Makalintal
