Cooking the Chronicle – Dec 6
Soup season! I opened up last week’s Chronicle to search for the recipe as beautiful flurries of snow glided across my windows. Jessica Grann’s recipes as of late have been using great seasonal ingredients, but have also been spot on with the changing season vibes. There’s nothing cozier than soup on a cold day.
This tomato basil bisque (“Tomato basil bisque,” Dec 6) seemed very simple to whip up at first impression, with ingredients that are easy to work with. I appreciated that there was no finicky roasting and peeling of whole tomatoes here. The canned fire-roasted tomatoes gave the whole soup a smokey flavor which was new and interesting to me. It was a perfect cooking project for a toddler who loves to pour things into pots. The only real work was chopping and sautéing the onion.
The herbs took center stage here in this recipe and I would recommend using fresh basil and thyme to bring some life to the canned tomatoes and sauce.
To me, calling a soup a bisque indicates a rich creamy broth, so I did not hold back on adding the cream. A tablespoon is nice as a garnish in each bowl, but have you considered just dumping in the whole pint into the pot of soup? Remember, measure with your heart. In all seriousness, though, I agree with Grann. If you are sensitive to acid food or if you just prefer a dairy soup, add the cream. You won’t be sorry.
I made two executive decisions here. First, to serve this with grilled cheese (another argument for leaning into the addition of cream to the soup), which was a delicious, classic pairing.
Second, to halve this recipe. At first read, it looked like this recipe would make quite a large amount of soup. Because our freezer is quite full from the wonderful meal train our community set up to support after the birth of our twins, we didn’t have room for many more leftovers. I think this was a good decision, but the soup would freeze very nicely if you made the full amount. I would just recommend freezing before you add the dairy—sometimes reheating creamy soups can go wrong and they split a little in the microwave or on the stovetop.
The real challenge of this recipe was convincing my three-year old to eat something red that was not ketchup. I even tried to rebrand this as ketchup soup, but she saw right through that. I will never give up hope that because we engaged with the ingredients in the cooking of the meal, she will be inclined to try it. But so it goes with toddlers!
