The Recipe with Kenji and Deb - Tomato Soup

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Some people think tomato soup only exists to serve as a dipping sauce for grilled cheese, but Kenji and Deb are here to set them straight. A properly, lovingly made tomato soup — even with sad-looking supermarket tomatoes from February — can be a time portal, from the dreariest winter day to the peak of summer farmer’s market fresh. Kenji makes Deb’s genius “grilled cheese kind of built into the tomato soup”, unlocking a new level of tomato soup nirvana.Recipes mentioned: Deb’s Weeknight Tomato Soup (from Smitten Kitchen) Deb’s Classic Grilled Cheese + Cream of Tomato Soup (from Smitten Kitchen) Deb’s Roasted Tomato Soup with Broiled Cheddar (from Smitten Kitchen) Kenji’s Fast and Easy Pasta with Blistered Cherry Tomato Sauce (from Serious Eats) Kenji’s 15-Minute Creamy Tomato Soup (Vegan) (from Serious Eats) Lisa Steele’s Cream-Fried Eggs (from the Washington Post)

Hey friends, it's Kevin Pang from America's Test Kitchen. I want to tell you about our storytelling podcast, Proof. We tell stories like follow the U.S. military's decades-long journey of creating an MRE pizza. We go behind the scenes of the Broadway musical Sweeney Todd to learn just how do the show's infamous pies get made. Every episode is filled with dynamic characters and lots of twists and turns. Check out Proof wherever you find your favorite podcasts. My daughter's new favorite joke, we learned it from Siri, who we asked to tell us a joke every morning. What? I didn't know you could do that. You can say, hey Siri, tell me a joke,

and now everybody's listening to this,, hey Siri, tell me a joke. And now everybody's listening to this. Siri's going to tell them a joke. No, the joke was, what do you call a nose with no body? What do you call it? Nobody knows. Hey everyone, welcome to The Recipe with Kenji and Deb. Where we help you discover your own perfect recipes. Kenji is the author of The Food Lab and The Walk and a columnist for The New York Times.

And Deb is the creator of Smitten Kitchen, and she's also the author of three best-selling cookbooks. We're both professional home cooks, which means we can and will make the same dish 57 times in our quest for the perfect recipe. And on this show, we're going to share our techniques and ingredients so that you can figure out what works best for you. This week, we're talking about... Tomato soup. Tomato soup. That's next on The Recipe, so stick around. There's just one reason for tomato soup's popularity, and it is this. The magic matchless flavor of Campbell's tomato soup.

Deb, did you have any Campbell's tomato soup growing up? Because to me, I feel like Campbell's is the sort of benchmark for what tomato soup is for most people. I actually did not have Campbell's soup growing up, Campbell's tomato soup. And I feel like I might have had it at a friend's house, maybe for a play date, but not at home. And I actually don't think tomato soup was much of a thing at all. think tomato soup was much of a thing at all. We must have had it a couple times. I didn't grow up unfamiliar with what it was, but it wasn't like a standard thing that people in my family were into. So I came to it as an adult, like I did to a lot of foods. What about at like the school cafeteria? Did you have it at school? I think I brought my own lunch. Okay. God, I'm no fun at all. I don't have any strong memories of it. I don't think that this was a big thing. How about you? Did you eat it growing up?

We definitely had a lot of condensed soup. We were more of a chicken soup family, but we had tomato soup from time to time. But I can guarantee you a lot of people listening, Campbell's tomato soup, it's the second best selling, I think the second best selling flavor of condensed Campbell's soup after chicken noodle and before cream of mushroom. I'm assuming in your diligent research for this episode, you tasted Campbell's tomato soup recently. I did. Okay. What did you think of it? You warned me it was going to be sweet. I'm like, no, it's sweet.

It's very sweet. It's very sweet. This episode is a little bit different because, so yes, we both have existing tomato soup recipes. In fact, we both have multiple existing tomato soup recipes. How many do you have? I believe I have at least two and more if you're going to count things like gazpacho and like other things that aren't really in that same genre of like hot tomato soup that you would pair with a grilled cheese. I have other types of tomato soup. But I think in that hot tomato soup category, I have two recipes.

Although one of them is like by far the most popular one, which is the one I sent to you. But that said, for this episode, we also just coincidentally, it wasn't planned, but we were both in the process of working on a brand new tomato soup recipe. And so we got the opportunity to test each other's recipes in progress. Yeah, I think I actually have three. No, I have two tomato soups on this that are just like more of a classic tomato soup. And one uses canned tomatoes and one uses fresh tomatoes. There's one you have called classic grilled cheese and cream of tomato soup. To give you an idea of how old this recipe is, let me read one of the comments on here, the second comment on here, which says, Ha ha, we are also addicted to Lost.

Oh my God, I love the way you're taking it. Too bad the next episode will be in February. This must have been, wow. Very old, almost 20 years. We are talking about the first three months of Spit in Kitchen. This recipe though, let's talk through it real quick. It's based on a Cook's Illustrated recipe. The idea is you take canned tomatoes, you strain them, then you take the strained chunks,

you put them on a sheet tray that's lined with foil, and then you roast them, right? The foil is so specific. Do you remember the rationale of why foil is used for the roasting rather than, I don't know, parchment or just oiling the pan? So this recipe, I've made it a couple of times at Cooks Illustrated, but it was developed like years before I even started. I was still a restaurant cook when you were writing this recipe. But my guess would be that it's one of those Cooks Illustrated things where they just find their readers would rather not have to clean a sheet pan. That would be my guess.

It's interesting because when I make it, getting the tomatoes off the aluminum foil is my biggest pet peeve. It's always a little messy. Getting the tomatoes off the aluminum foil is my biggest pet peeve. It's always a little messy. This foil, they get a little stuck to it where they get caramelized in spots. And I'm trying not to tear the foil into the pan. These days I have nonstick foil too. So that takes care of that.

But I always wonder about that. What is the idea behind the roasting and the process of this recipe? So the process is you take a couple cans of tomatoes, the large whole tomatoes, and you're going to tear them open, get rid of the seeds, drain the juices. I saved the juices so we can use it again. But they were looking for, I remember the Cooks Illustrated said they were looking for a perfectly smooth soup

with a rich color and a great tomato flavor. And they've coaxed it out of canned tomatoes with this roasting step. They feel that by roasting it with some brown sugar on top until it gets a little charred in spot, you get a much better, fresher tomato taste, like a more pure taste. And I think it's because canned tomatoes have a slightly higher, they're a little more acidic, correct? Because they need to be safe for canning. And so they tend to taste a little saltier and tangier than fresh tomatoes do always.

Well, that's interesting because I know for a fact that in tomato taste tests I've done, both at Cooks Illustrated and elsewhere, the highest rated tomatoes tend to be the ones that are highest both in acidity and in sugar, that people want like very acidic, very bright and very sweet tomatoes, but they want those two things to be in balance. So if they're very sweet without any acidity, that's a problem. And if they're very acidic without any sweetness, that's also a problem. But like high acid, high sugar tends to make people think of bright, fresh, ripe tomatoes. But this recipe, I guess you're adding a little bit of brown sugar to it before you roast it. So you are definitely increasing that sweetness that might balance out some of that extra acidity that you might get in some canned tomatoes.

And also, I guess sweetness is a flavor you'd expect in tomato soup, especially if you grew up eating something like a Campbell's, right? Absolutely. So my pet peeve with tomato soups growing up, I remember it more in college, like maybe having it in college dorms or cafeterias was that I didn't like tomato soups that tasted like marinara sauce, like spaghetti sauce. I didn't want it to have like that basil, garlic, oregano, pepper. Like I wanted it to taste more purely of a cream of tomato. So I guess more of that classic. From here on the recipe though, it goes a little more classic with the ingredients where you're cooking shallots and butter to get that kind of sweet base. You're adding tomato paste. There's a pinch of ground allspice, which I find very interesting there, but it does add a little bit of warmth.

It doesn't show up that much in the end, but it does have like a nice little note there. little bit of a roux from this butter shallot mixture with flour, adding some stock, a little cream, and a little bit of sherry or brandy, if you wish, which I actually love in there. I think it makes it taste grown up. So talking through this, we're using a bowl and a strainer. We're using a can opener. We're using a bowl and a strainer to drain the tomatoes. We're using a foiled lined rimmed baking sheet. We're turning on the oven. We are then using a Dutch oven on the stovetop and sauteing some stuff. And then we're putting it, overall, it is a pretty complicated

tomato soup recipe, I gotta say. It's like a typical Cook's Illustrated fashion. It gets good results, but it is not the simplest way to do it. Your other recipe that I've made, I can't remember when I made it, like maybe three years ago. It was inspired by French onion soup, right? But instead of a Gruyere...

Yes! I'm so glad you remember that one. It's one of my favorites. Instead of a Gruyere crouton, you're roasting whole tomatoes, or you're roasting fresh tomatoes that you've split, roasting them in the oven until they caramelize a little bit. You're using that as the base for your soup, which you puree to a sort of chunky consistency. And then you put it into mugs and top them with cheddar topped with a crouton and grated cheddar cheese. And then you broil that. And so you end up with the grilled cheese kind of built into the tomato soup, which is delicious. And I think a brilliant idea and delicious. I remember I'd run that recipe in September.

And for me, I think September, a lot of times people switch away from farmer's market produce. And it's a huge shame because you can really get wonderful tomatoes through early November at the market. So that's why I wanted to do a fresh tomato soup. I also did, I wanted it to be different from the classic cream of tomato soup because with the richness of the crouton on top and the cheddar cheese, I didn't feel like it needed that creamy, smooth base. If you think of like onion

soup, it's definitely the soup underneath is broth base. It has some texture to it. And so I basically chose the foundation of a simpler, here's just, we're going to roast tomatoes. But I had so much fun with that, taking this idea of a French onion soup and making it into an American roasted tomato soup with broiled cheddar. We need more cheesy crouton topped soups. I have like six other ideas like that. I have a couple others that I just, for whatever reason, just keep holding on to and I should push them out the door. But there's definitely times in the fall and winter

where it's just so fun to do it that way. Yeah, like a broccoli soup with a cheesy crouton on top. That would be delicious. Plus you get those pieces. I don't know about you, but like for the onion soup and also with this soup, my favorite parts are the parts of the cheese that come down the side and get a little crispy and maybe burnt. And you a little bit have to chisel them off. And they're like cheddar frico, like the parmesan crisp, but it's the best part. And then you just

sink that back in. So there's the cream of tomato soup, the very classic one with a lot of steps and processes. And it's quite classic cooks illustrated in that you will have a fantastic cream of tomato soup. It's absolutely wonderful. I've made it a bunch of times. So I don't consider it to be an arduous amount of work, but I'm not necessarily doing it on a weeknight.

Certainly not anymore. I feel like there's always, for me personally, in my recipe repertoire, there's always room for the ultimate, the one that has a few steps and kind of fussy processes, but it will be exceptional. Like if I was having friends over, I would make the fancier one. And then there's always the simpler one, the one I make on a weeknight. And that is, I think, the one I shared with you while I was working on it, which I literally call weeknight creamy tomato soup, and we are talking about tomato soup today. And right now we are about to talk about Deb's brand new tomato soup recipe, which I cooked last week, and it was simple and delicious. You've called it weeknight cream of tomato soup, and I'm going to ask you some questions once we talk about it. Delicious. You've called it weeknight cream of tomato soup. And I'm going to ask you some questions once we talk about it. So basically you start with butter and you're sauteing some

onions and butter. Then you're adding some garlic and you're adding quite a bit of tomato paste. And then you're adding a pound, actually 20 ounces. I think you changed it up to 20 ounces, something like that. But you're adding a pound of cherry or grape tomatoes. So not Roma's, not beefsteaks, cherry or grape tomatoes. And that's basically it. You're then finishing it off with a little bit of stock, letting it simmer for about 15 to 20 minutes. And then you're pureeing it all, stirring in some cream and a little bit of sherry and seasoning it. And that is it. It's super, super simple, but it gets a really nice flavor. And you know what I found really nice is that probably because of the type of tomatoes you use, it

actually gets a really nice sweetness. So I made these with tomatoes I bought from Safeway. Oh, wow. And it still gets like a really nice, sweet, fresh tomato flavor that is, well, much, much better than the canned stuff. The canned stuff, I always find the wheat flour in there dulls some of the flavors, whereas this one is very nice and bright. Let's talk about those tomatoes first. Why cherry tomatoes? I believe that I started tinkering with this version of the soup over the pandemic too, where we were home a lot and sometimes buying our groceries in larger bulk than we normally do in New York City. And I don't know, I have just a theory that most people just have a package of cherry or grape tomatoes in their fridge at all times. They're such a grocery staple in America

and they're often quite inexpensive. And they taste okay. Sometimes they taste okay. Sometimes they taste bland. They're not amazing. But my feeling is that they still will contribute to the soup. I think they still have a more dynamic, nuanced, sweet flavor than canned tomatoes do. And I think what you get from the store-bought tomatoes, even when they're not exciting to eat, is you get a bit of sweetness. You still get that fiber, so you get that creamy texture without having to use a brew.

It's the pectin, yeah. Yeah. And just like the fiber that you get, it's got a nice velvety texture when you blend it. And plus, I just love recipes that use up ingredients that we might have too much of. Like dump it into the pot and make this really delicious soup. So it's trying to build on them. I completely agree with you about cherry tomatoes. I have a recipe for this cherry tomato pasta sauce that it's like basically an all year fresh tomato pasta sauce that uses cherry tomatoes. And it's basically because it's because of the square cube law. You know, the square, like the reason why dinosaurs can't like get infinitely large. No, no.

So if you imagine it's a dinosaur, right? Its size grows in three dimensions, but the size of its footprint only grows in two dimensions if a dinosaur grows bigger. And so you proportionately have to support more weight on a smaller amount of surface area the bigger you get. And so larger things tend to collapse under their own weight. Like the bigger they are, the harder they fall, basically. And so bigger tomatoes are much more prone to collapsing under their own weight or getting bruised under their own weight as opposed to smaller tomatoes. So it's because smaller tomatoes, cherry tomatoes can actually spend longer on the vine and be picked at a riper state than something like a big beefsteak tomato

can. Beefsteak tomatoes are picked when they're still green, so they're very firm during shipping, whereas cherry tomatoes can be picked when they're red, so they're much riper during shipping. And when they get to the, by the time they get to the market, cherry tomatoes tend to have better flavor than big beefsteak tomatoes do. And this is, of course, only in the winter and only when we're talking about tomatoes that spend a long time being shipped around. Modern cherry tomatoes, I feel like they've gone through a farming renaissance probably in the last 10 years or so, where now when you go to the supermarket, you see lots of different varieties of cherry tomatoes and you see some that are marketed as specifically sweeter than others,

some that are marketed as having a better aroma than others. Sugar bombs, I keep seeing. Sugar bombs and cherubs and halos and stuff. Yeah. I love them. They're delicious. They're so much better than they were when I was a kid. But yeah, you can definitely find cherry tomatoes that have really great sweetness and a really nice aroma to them. I loved being able to use this grocery store staple that maybe you could get on sale or maybe you had it, you wanted to use it up. And you didn't have to get into the differing quality of different canned tomatoes

because sometimes they're good and sometimes they're just okay, but they're often a little stringy. Sometimes they have puree in them. Sometimes they have my least favorite thing, which is that like brown soggy rag of a piece of quote unquote basil. That's my ick. Can't handle it. I just pull it out. either side. I don't mind those. I don't want, and I don't even want the basil flavor. In your tomato soup? My tomato soup. That's fair. Okay.

But from there, the recipe is very classic. I use a mild white onion because I really want to get it sweet. I feel like that sweet base is really nice. I saute it in a bit of butter. I'm trying to sweat them out in the butter, but I also like it when they get a little brown at the edges. So I'll take it, I'll take it to about 10 minutes sometimes. And then you add a little garlic and then you add a little tomato paste. And I feel like the tomato paste really helps here because you're not necessarily gonna get as much body

from the cherry tomatoes. You've got a lot of seeds, you have a lot of skin. So it gives you that sort of background. It also gives you the deeper tomato flavor because your soup only simmers for 15 to 20 minutes. And so you don't get much sort of concentration of background. It also gives you the deeper tomato flavor that, you know, because your soup only simmers for 15 to 20 minutes. And so you don't get much sort of concentration of flavor. Like I feel like the cherry tomatoes add the freshness, whereas the paste adds the sort of richer, deeper tomato flavor. It's a nice, it's a nice balance. Tomato paste is actually one of my

favorite ingredients. I mean, if you're talking about something with tomatoes, it's probably my favorite tomato format to buy. I feel like it's such an underrated ingredient where it's just, it will add the velvety tomato texture that you want. And it's also a thickener with a very good tomato flavor and inexpensively. It's just easy. So I love adding a spoonful to sauces when you're trying to boost the tomato flavor without opening another can or another box of cherry tomatoes. I was going to say one thing I noticed with your recipe on tasting it. So it has a very small amount of cream.

And in fact, your cream is even optional. So for 24 ounces of tomatoes or 20 ounces of tomatoes, it uses a quarter cup of cream and you just stir it in at the end optionally. I do like the flavor of cream, but it's always a trade-off adding cream because you're adding richness, you're adding some kind of sweetness to it, optionally. I do like the flavor of cream, but it's always a trade-off adding cream because you're adding richness, you're adding some kind of sweetness to it, but cream also tends to dull

brighter flavors. And so you lose some of the brightness of the tomatoes, which you, you know, in your recipe, you add a little bit of sherry vinegar. I didn't use sherry to cook with, but I used some, I added a little bit of sherry vinegar at the end. And I think that sherry vinegar does help balance out the dullness that the cream introduces. Yeah. My family's not wild about creamy soups. I love them, but I'm with you where as soon as the soup usually has a lot of cream in it, it blocks the flavor. You've worked so hard to develop this base and then you blot it out, but not always. We'll get into that with yours, but I love it as a drizzle at the end and I love it as a finishing thing. But I also,

I love finishes in soup like I used to think I wasn't a soup person and then it just realized that I wasn't finishing it in an interesting way I like things that kind of lift it at the end I like it when the cream isn't completely mixed in I like a little swirl in the bowl it is funny because I always bring it to the table and my son immediately mixes it so everything's evenly mixed and I'm like no I love a little odd off spoonful. I love a little float of vinegar or something interesting on top. I like crunchies in my soup and oils and herbs.

Or at the very least, just like some coarsely ground black pepper at the very end. It's just like it needs to look a little bit non-homogenous at the end. Your time it looks, I'm like, I just like that little like lift at the end before it gets every, before you get into that, like every spoonful is exactly like the spoonful before moment, which I thought I didn't like. So another note you put in your recipe, which I've seen in some of your other recipes that I think we should very briefly touch on is cooking for children. Cause you wrote red pepper flakes, if not cooking for my children, which to me felt like, okay, I get if your children don't like red pepper flakes, but did you put that in there because you feel like most children don't like red pepper flakes or is this like a... I am in particular roasting my own

children here. So I'm not trying to bring other people's children might eat spice. I also have, and I don't think they're particularly fancy, but whatever jar of red pepper flakes I have right now, like whatever brand I've emptied into the jar I have for it, I am telling you that a quarter teaspoon of this will make an entire dish spicy. And I don't mean like in a wimpy, I grew up with a salt and pepper home. We had done like a shrimp scampi spaghetti the other night and we put in a quarter teaspoon, which seems like a very normal, and it was a spicy dish. So I think I just might have very strong ones, which is why I'm extra cautious, but I use a lot when I want to have a little

bit of heat, but I'm not trying to like make my children run away. And by the way, my children, I have two and the other one doesn't actually mind spice. Not a lot. Pepper flakes are among the most inconsistent ingredients I find from brand to brand. It's sometimes they're really hot. Sometimes they're not. And it's hard to know until you do it. So one of my favorite, just like if you want to buy yourself a treat of spices, I love burlap and barrels, silk chili. It's very close to an Aleppo chili flake. What I love about it is that you can definitely put it in more generously without worrying about like blowing the face off a small child who is tentative about spice, but still give it a little bit of heat to it. So I might use that instead in this case. When you made my recipe, did you put the chili flakes in there?

So last night I made your caramelized cream of tomato soup and you do call for a pinch of red pepper flakes. I think I use the silk chili flakes in that one just to be cautious. However, we should talk about it and I have a bunch of questions. First of all, it was fantastic. It smelled so good that I texted you in the middle to say like, it smells so good in here. And I have a bunch of questions. First of all, it was fantastic. It smelled so good that I texted you in the middle to say like, it smells so good in here. And I'm not like, we talk enough on this podcast. I'm not usually need to text you like live reviews of your recipes, but that's how good it smelled in here. It was really incredible. I think actually though, with that, you use a higher amount of cream. We'll talk about that. I think it could have definitely handled the heat

though. The cream also will mute the heat. So if you're going to have a richer dish, you can definitely handle maybe not a quarter teaspoon of the stuff that I currently have, but you know, I could have handled the real stuff. So let's talk about your tomato soup, which I made last night. Cause we start with Roma or cherry tomatoes. I used Roma tomatoes, but talk to me about how you developed your current caramelized cream of tomato soup. The soup actually sort of a byproduct of other sort of testing I've been doing based on cooking in cream. So there's this great book that came out a couple of years ago called the Fresh Eggs Daily Cookbook. Lisa Steele is the author. And in it, there's this recipe that it became a

little bit internet famous, maybe very internet famous, where I called caramelized cream fried eggs or something like that. But essentially you put, I just posted an Instagram video of it this morning because I had some leftover cream from when I was making tomato soup. But you put cream in a skillet and you heat it up on the stovetop and then you crack a couple eggs into it and then you cook it on the stovetop

until the cream breaks and it starts to fry. Because cream and butter are essentially the same basic constituents. You know, cream and butter are both made of butterfat, water, and then milk proteins and milk sugars. It's just in different ratios. So cream has a higher ratio of water and a higher ratio of sort of milk proteins and milk sugars. But what that means is that once you cook the water out of cream, you end up with essentially brown butter, but with a really high concentration of sugars and milk proteins. So like an extra intense brown

butter flavor that that kind of translates into whatever you're cooking it in. So after I started playing with that recipe, I tried roasting things by tossing them in cream first. I've tried like searing steaks in cream, which actually works really well. That sounds amazing. But this recipe, yeah, you essentially you take your tomato, you take tomatoes and onions and you toss them with a little bit of cream inside a Dutch oven. And then you throw the Dutch, the whole Dutch oven into the oven and you let it roast in there until the cream breaks and starts to caramelize. And so the idea is you don't want to stir it too much because I like actually having sort of some bits that are just steamy and softened underneath, but also some bits that are really

browned on top that all get blended together. And then once you're done roasting everything, you basically puree it all with a couple of extra seasonings. So there's no stove top step. It's just you put everything in a Dutch oven, you roast it, and then you puree it. And so for me, part of it was an exercise of what can I do with this idea of caramelized cream and where would it apply? And then the other part of it was,

well, I have an existing tomato soup recipe that's very simple and is all stovetop. Maybe I'll come up with a very simple tomato soup recipe that involves only the oven. And for me, especially with something like tomato soup, if my goal is to make like a really simple recipe, I want it to be either all stovetop or all oven and not have to have you mix heat sources. Cause I think that's the part where people are like, Oh, I got to do this and that. So if you can do it all in one go, I think it makes people feel happier about it as they go

through. I thought it was so good. Now you are calling for fresh tomatoes. Roma tomatoes are very, again, very high in pectin. They're what's known as paste tomatoes. They're used for making sauce. So they're extremely high in pectin, which makes them naturally sort of denser and firmer than something like a beefsteak tomato. So they're not as watery. I wouldn't, I would not make this with a beefsteak tomato. I have, I've tried it. It comes out blander. It doesn't come out bad, but it comes out blander. The Roma tomatoes offer good flavor. Cherry tomatoes also work really well. And I think just like in your recipe where you combine it with tomato paste, the tomato paste does the bulk of the heavy lifting as far as those deeper, richer, more tomato-y flavors go.

The smell of it though in the oven was just incredible. It smelled so good. It was like buttery or maybe it smelled like almost a ziti baking. It smelled so good. I bet adding a Parmesan rind in there would make it good too. But the cool thing is it doesn't need it. Like you're not even adding butter to it. It's really just the cream carrying the whole thing. And I read the recipe and I thought I read it a few times before I made it. So I thought I had time and then I did not have time, which is like so classically me. So I had missed that you don't just roast it for 20, that you roast it for 40 additionally. You're talking about the dimension time, not the herb time. Yeah.

Yes. Okay. The recipe does not call for time. Does not. We're going to talk about that. I had misread the recipe and I was late. I had to go to tennis, so I didn't get a chance to try it before I left. But my husband texted me to say it was so good. Not just my kids loving your recipes, but my own husband is texting me to tell me how good it is that I've missed as I left. I had it when I came home and it was amazing. Well, that makes me happy. Going back to what you mentioned about cream and not having butter for me, this like this comes to this speaks

to one of the recipes or the calculus that I have to do when I'm designing a recipe, because I thought to myself, can this recipe use butter? Right. Would that improve the flavor? And I tried it with a little butter. I'm like, actually, it does taste a little bit better with butter. But then the calculus is, does that make the recipe too complicated to call for both cream and butter? Because there's always this question of like, do people want more ingredients and how much is adding an extra ingredient going to actually improve the recipe or would they prefer a simpler one? And with this one, I came down to the side that really the simpler, the better, and unless it's going to make like a drastic difference, I'm not going to add any extra ingredients. Going back to what you were saying before,

how sometimes you have these sort of what you call ultimate recipes. Yeah, I have a lot of those ultimate recipes too. And in those, it's always like, all right, I'm willing to do 80% more work just to make this dish five to 10% better. And that's sort of what I factor in when I'm talking about an ultimate recipe. But when I'm talking about like a very quick 15 to 20 minute, well, this recipe takes longer because it roasts for 40 minutes, but the actual amount of work you do, it's all hands off. The amount of work you do is like five minutes, right? It's just chopping up a vegetable. Absolutely. And I was so impressed that you don't have to heat it when you're done. Like I was like, how is that going to have enough heat just from roasting that I don't have to warm this broth too? And I didn't. It was the perfect

temperature. It's because the Dutch oven stores so much heat in there, right? So you pour the broth in there and the Dutch oven immediately heats it up. It was so good. It was so good. I think it's a truly genius recipe because it gets a tremendous amount of flavor out of a few ingredients. And people love that because we're a lot more likely to have an onion, a few tomatoes, and a box of cream than we are to have that plus four other things. And as recipe developers, we think about that stuff all the time, like how much garlic is worth it to make the garlic show up? And again, how much is butter going to add and or how much is it going to just push people away from the recipe? Because now they have to use butter and cream and this.

But it smelled amazing. It tasted amazing. People who are listening to this now who are of the mind that adding a little bit of extra butter is not much work can now just do it and it will taste better. Of course they can. I'm like, could you get that brown butter flavor? Now, personally, I loved the richness of the soup, but I probably would have been okay with it if it just had, I would say two thirds of a cup of cream instead. Would that ruin it if I were to roast it with less? I don't think so. I think that's actually

very good feedback because in my initial recipe, the one that I was working on like a few weeks ago or a couple months ago now, I was trying to use up a package. And so I had a pint of it. So it actually had two cups of heavy cream in it initially, which was a lot. In fact, when I sent you the recipe, I think there was still like an unedited step that said, add a cup of cream at the end when you don't have a cup of cream left. But I initially was doing it with a full pint of heavy cream and that was too much. So I reduced it down to just one cup of heavy cream. And I think I'll probably, in fact, reduce it down to probably half a cup. Of course, you will have the package size issue. Again, some people,

but it might've just been, as I said, I felt like I was going to get the worst tomatoes you could possibly buy and they ended up tasting pretty good. So it might've just been that my tomatoes were really good and they just didn't need it. But just personally, I felt like there was a tremendous amount of flavor. It did not occlude the flavor the way I expected that much cream to, or the way it might in other soup recipes. I thought it, and maybe that's because you're roasting it and you're developing it. You're not just like pouring it on at the end and coating everything in a butterfat balloon that you can't taste your way through. Your recipe certainly has a much cleaner, brighter tomato flavor than mine. Whereas

mine has a sort of more roastier flavor, I find. But it was so cozy and so good. And I'm looking forward to the leftovers. I really like a cream of tomato soup with some lentils in it. Not traditional. But so one of my favorite store bought products is, see, not just an ingredient, is I love Trader Joe's. They sell these vacuum packed cooked lentils and they're absolutely, and obviously you and I both know how to cook lentils from dry. Very easy. Very quick. Just want to like, they're so easy. They taste a hundred percent better than anything canned would. They're absolutely perfectly cooked. And so I love sprinkling that into a salad or something like this, where I just want to add a little more bulk for the leftover, just for me personally, what I'm craving today.

So I think I'm going to do that. How about we take a little break right now? And when we get back, we'll talk about what we've been doing with leftovers. Kenji, did you end up with a lot of leftover tomato soup for this episode as you were preparing? And what did you do with it? Oh, yeah. Well, I ended up with three and a half quarts of leftover tomato soup because I made mine a few times and I made yours once. And so yours makes a couple of quarts and I had another like four quarts of mine. What I did was I actually took

mine and yours and I combined them into one in a blender. And it was like, it was like Captain Planet. It was like the power of our soups combined turned into a much better soup almost. So we can tell people if you want the ideal tomato soup, make Deb's tomato, stovetop tomato soup, make my oven tomato soup, and then blend them together. That sounds delicious. No, it actually came out really nicely when I blended them together because it had, you know, because yours, I feel like leans heavily into those sort of the brighter tomato flavors, whereas mine is more into the other roaster, richer tomato flavors. And so together, you know, it's more of like a symphony. You got the, you got the piccolos and the base. And I actually just realized we're both using, you use a pound and a half of tomatoes.

I'm using a pound and a quarter, but it's very similar amounts. We both have four tablespoons of tomato paste. I think I have a little more broth in mine. Well, this to me also spoke to the fact that we started with very virtually identical ingredients, not quite the same, but pretty identical. Completely separately. We both were like working with the same ingredients. And we ended up with two recipes that have a very different flavor at the same, but pretty identical. Completely separately. We both were like working with the same ingredients. And we ended up with two recipes that have a very different flavor at the end, which I think really just points to like the technique and the way you handle ingredients is as important, if not, in this case, even more important than the ingredients themselves. I just feel like fresh tomatoes get a bad rap in the winter. And I understand they do not taste

like a freshly plucked from the garden summer tomato, but I feel like they add a richness and a sweetness and a dynamic flavor that you're never going to get from canned, which is always a little more one note and has its purposes. But for both of us, we separately came to the conclusion that the best use of it was not soup for canned tomatoes. Well, I mean, I do have another tomato soup recipe which uses canned tomatoes that I'm very happy with, but it tastes very different. And in fact, you probably would not like it as much

because it has more of a tomato sauce flavor to it. It leans pretty heavily into like the oregano and olive oil and garlic. That's one of my most popular recipes ever is that tomato soup. It's called 15-minute like creamless, creamy tomato soup. And you don't use cream in it. Instead, you blend a slice of bread into it. And so it emulsifies like a gazpacho does. And it gets

really nice and rich and creamy, but it doesn't dull the flavor the way cream does. I really enjoy that recipe. It's one that I make pretty frequently. Could I throw like tortellini in it? Absolutely. And go like the full way with the Italian flavor? I think it just needs to own it if it's going to have the Italian thing going. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, there are definitely classic tomato soups out there that by default have other, I think there's like a Polish tomato soup that uses capolini in it, uses little pieces of pasta in it, or maybe chunks of carrots and stuff.

I read about that one. Pretty much any place where there's tomatoes, they have a tomato soup in their culture but a polish came up there's definitely indian tomato soups that use a lot of spices you might associate with the cooking from cumin to cardamom to ginger exactly and then of course in spain andalusia you have the gazpacho but such a different animal it's fresh with peppers and cucumbers and it's blended so it but it tomatoes exist there too. It's more like a salmorejo, I think is the answer. Oh, I was just going to say that. Well, you said it properly. I was going to say salmorejo.

But that's one of my favorites. It's a delicious olive oil soup. There's no cream in it. And that's more popular. It's more of a Southern Spain soup. but I had it when I was in Spain and it was incredible. It has a lot of olive oil in it. And the place I had it, served it with, it had an array of little bowls with things you could spoon into it from croutons to grated hard boiled egg to some dice. It was so much fun. What I did actually end up doing with the combined leftovers of ours was I turned it into a chicken tikka masala sauce. The apocryphal origins of chicken tikka masala in the first place are like, oh, it was invented in Glasgow or London or something like that. And people say it

was literally made with a can of Campbell's chicken soup, which I think is probably inaccurate. I think originally it's actually like a dish from like Bangladesh or Pakistan, but, or based on a dish from there. But, but I, what I did was I sauteed a puree of garlic and ginger, and then I added, I wanted to make this super easy. And we had just been at World Spice. My daughter asked if we can go to a spice shop because she found out, she heard there's these shops that sell just spices. And so we went to the spice shop and we bought their masala blend that was intended for this, for like a chicken tikka masala sauce. And so I basically just cooked down a puree of garlic and ginger, added their spice blend to it,

bloomed a little, and then poured in our combined tomato soups. And it was delicious. And then put that over a chicken that I broiled, marinated and broiled. But I was just thinking that would also be delicious with your lentils. Like that would be delicious with lentils or chickpeas,

something like that. Okay, but before I'm like, I was actually going to make a chickpea curry for dinner tonight and I had some other ingredients in mind, like a coconut milk. But in remembering, I have leftover of your soup, and I feel like it might be fun to do. Give it a shot. I have a recipe in my last book, which is almost like a little bit of a butter chickpeas type thing, where you use a creamy, quick tomato base with spices to cook chickpeas.

And it's really good. But I'm like, I feel like I should use the soup first. I had leftover clarified butter from our pancake episode. You're still working your way through that? Oh yeah, yeah. That I used to saute, you know, cook down the garlic and ginger. So I didn't even have to clarify butter for that. Could you announce for the sake of the podcast, when you end up using it up, like the episode, like, is it going to be June? Like when we're talking about like i don't know cucumbers or something no you mean clarified butter is one of those things that when i make it i make a lot but

then i just use it for you to use it yeah i fried toast in it this morning oh that sounds really good oh yeah if you've never if you've never tried like just frying bread in butter instead of toasting i love frying in olive oil but i've never done it in butter fry bread and clarified butter it's the way you would make like diner toast. It's like they put clarified butter on the griddle and then slap a piece of bread on there. And that's how you make toast. The way you would do a grilled cheese, but with just a slice of bread. Speaking of grilled cheese, is grilled cheese an essential component of a bowl of tomato soup for you? I think for classic cream of tomato soup, they go together like peanut butter and jelly,

but we're going to do a whole episode about that. So we'll have plenty of time to talk about a good grilled cheese, a perfect grilled cheese, the incorrect way to cut a grilled cheese, which is not the way I do it. I know people have been waiting for this and we're just wetting the palate. So I think it's time for our wrap-up questions. Does it waffle? Does it taco? And can you fry it in butter in a pan? I think this is the first episode we've had where I'm afraid to try waffling tomato soup. We're not waffling tomato soup. There's no way. You can waffle the grilled cheese. You can waffle the grilled cheese.

Yeah, and have the tomato soup on the side. And dip it in. But it's much more of a sauce for something that has been waffled than something you would waffle. Wait a minute, Deb. Deb. What? You can Belgian waffle a grilled cheese and then pour tomato soup into the wells. What do you think of that? Wait a second. Wait a second. You have a Belgian waffle shaped piece of grilled, like a grilled cheese that's the shape of a Belgian waffle on a plate. And then instead of syrup going into the waffle wells, you pour tomato soup into the waffle wells. Oh, my God. Yes. You do this when you have like a cup of soup left over, like when you don't have enough soup left over for a full meal.

Oh, my God. I should try that and see how angry I can make my children. I love it, but we'll see. They might have fun with it. They surprise me sometimes. All right. So I would say that no, tomato soup does not waffle. I don't know that it tacos either. Can you imagine a way it would taco? I could see turning it into a taco sauce, but I don't know. So I think what you can do, you can make a quesadilla, corn tortilla quesadilla. So cheese, like cheddar cheese inside a folded corn tortilla, dip it into tomato soup the way you would do like a birria taco, and then fry it after it's been dipped in the tomato soup.

So the tomato soup kind of caramelizes on the outside. Oh, my God. I think this sounds, I'm not sure it's going to work, but I'm going to try it after we get off the call. I will post a picture on my Instagram. So people who follow my Instagram will know whether this works already if they're listening to this. I want to see you take an aesthetic picture of a grilled cheese taco, birria style with tomatoes. That's the photography challenge. I've made grilled cheese where, you know, like a kimchi grilled cheese.

But what I'd like to do when I make those is I put butter and some of the kimchi juice in the pan, like in the skillet. And then you fry it in this like kimchi juice butter and the kimchi just caramelizes into the bread. I think you could probably do something similar with just some tomato soup and get some of that tomato soup flavor built into either the bread or the tortilla or whatever, whatever you're going to use. I can't believe you talk about it because I've got, I'm coming up like snake eyes on this. I'm like, and can you fry it in butter in a pan? But you think you can, could you fry the tomato soup and butter in a pan? You could fry in butter in a pan, the stuff you would eat with the tomato soup. When I made the tikka masala sauce, that's essentially what you're doing because you're frying the aromatics. And so you do have like a ton of butter fat in that pan and then you're

pouring the tomato soup into it and kind of sears in the butter a little bit. It's not, I guess it's not quite frying in the sense, but you are getting hot butter in a pan and then pouring tomato soup in. I think that counts. I think it's yes on all three. Yeah. I think any recipe where you can get hot butter in a pan is better than a recipe without it. So I'm down with it. Well, all three sound delicious and I am in awe of your creativity. We could talk for hours and hours about tomato soup, but I feel like we've run out of time. Our audience is probably running out of attention, but we want to hear from you. So if you want to reach us, you can find us at therecipepodcast.com or at Kenji and Deb on Instagram. And we now have a phone number where you can call us. It's 202-709-7607.

And you can leave us a voicemail. Tell us what you like to serve with tomato soup. Tell us what you'd like to do with tomato soup leftovers. Or ask us any questions you might have. And your voicemail might be aired on the show. The recipe is created and co-hosted

by Deb Perlman and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. Our producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez, Harry Gregory, and Pedro Rafael Rosado of PRX Productions. Edwin Ochoa is the project manager. The executive producer for Radiotopia is Audrey Martovich, and Yuri Lasordo is director of network operations. Cher Delva, Apu Gote, Emmanuel Johnson, and Mike Russo handle our social media.

Thank you for listening. We are glad you're here. The Recipe with Kenji and Deb is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision at Radiiotopia.fm. Radiotopia. From PRX.