How to Make Tomato Basil Soup Mid-Winter

In the middle of winter, nothing warms you quite like a bowl of hot, creamy tomato basil soup. It can be tough to achieve the same delightful flavor you get from fresh sweet garden tomatoes and freshly picked basil leaves. However, with a little ingenuity, you can still have that satisfying late summer soup. Smack dab in the middle of winter. Say goodbye to that sad canned tomato soup. Say hello to summer-fresh-tasting tomato basil PESTO soup. So there, old man winter!

If you made and froze some basil pesto last summer, now’s the time to use it! And if you didn’t, well, you can definitely use store-bought pesto. Also, while home-canned tomatoes work best for this soup, store bought canned tomatoes will also suffice. Just please don’t try using store-bought midwinter tomatoes. I call those “plastic tomatoes” because they have NO flavor. Remember: the soup will reflect the taste of the ingredients. So choose your ingredients well.

To make this soup nice and creamy, we add a bit of cottage cheese (or light cream cheese). The cheese makes it creamy and helps balance out the acidity from the tomatoes. (Plus protein!) Sun dried tomatoes amp up the tomato flavor. Top it off with crunchy homemade croutons and Italian cheeses for that ooey gooey grilled cheese taste. (Alternatively, you can always toast up a nice grilled cheese sandwich for dunking.)

Sad Restaurant Soup Stories

I’m always dumbfounded when I go out to eat and soup is on the menu just how many restaurants serve sub-par soup. Perhaps it’s just me, but I”m just floored every. single. time this happens. Good soup is SO easy to make! So heartwarming and lovely. Bad soup is, well, just sad.

I’ve had many a disappointing soup at restaurants. My latest bad experience was what they claimed was French Onion Soup. When the waiter brought it to the table, it was simple a dark-colored bowl of broth with some onions in it. No bread. No cheese. The onions were barely sauteed, far from caramelized. They’d literally sauteed some onions, added some awful beef broth and served that. Someone thought that was French Onion Soup.

The young waiter had no idea what we were talking about when we asked where was the bread and cheese. He offered to bring us bread and cheese. I quickly realized this boy had no idea what real French Onion Soup was. And obviously the soup cook hadn’t a clue either. Sigh. I gave up and asked him to bring me some of their butternut soup, which was more of a warm mash of some flavorless squash sort of thing and LOTS of butter. Because it tasted like butter. That was it. Just butter. No squash flavor at all. At least it was palateable. Ish.

I’ve had similar experiences with tomato soup. I just want to retreat to my own kitchen. every. time. C’mon guys! Tomato soup is SO simple.

How do you make great tomato basil soup in the middle of winter?

So how do you make GREAT tomato soup in the midst of winter? As with ALL recipes, the key is all in the ingredients, my friends.

You start with good canned tomatoes. Best are the ones you’ve harvested and canned. But I’ve also heard of some people freezing their summer tomatoes and those would work too. The key is to grab those tomatoes right at the peak of flavor and sweetness. And preserve that taste. If you garden and can your tomatoes, you know what I mean. But even if you don’t can tomatoes, you can still have great tomato soup. Store-bought canned tomatoes are also harvested at their sweetest, ripest best moment.

Use fresh onion, garlic and extra virgin olive oil. I prefer to peel the garlic and onion myself. To UP the flavor! The chop doesn’t matter much here because you’re going to blend it later anyway. And good basil pesto. I really liked the creamy good flavor that the cottage cheese provided. But you can use Neufchatel if you prefer.

Finally, you need a good blender to get it super smooth and luscious. Ready to dive in? Let’s do this thing!

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