Roasted Tomato Soup

The Hatch chile shipment is coming early this year — the farm in New Mexico emailed me that the harvest is ahead of schedule. Thirty pounds this time (up from twenty-five, because last year I ran out in February and had to use canned chiles for the green chile stew, which was a personal failure I will not repeat). They'll arrive first week of August, right before the San Diego trip, so I'll need to roast and freeze them in a single day. The Great Chile Day. It's becoming an annual event.

In the meantime: summer continues. The garden is exploding. We've harvested more jalapeños than we can eat, so I've started making jalapeño jelly — a sweet-hot preserve that's incredible on cream cheese with crackers, on grilled chicken, or just on a spoon when nobody's watching. The process: jalapeños, sugar, apple cider vinegar, pectin. Cook it down, jar it, seal it. I made eight jars and distributed them to the firehouse, my parents, and the neighbors. Roberto's review: "Sweet. Hot. I'll take three more jars." Roberto, who claims to dislike anything that isn't traditional, is eating jalapeño jelly on toast every morning. Elena photographs the evidence and sends it to me.

The cherry tomatoes are producing at a rate that borders on agricultural. I can't eat them fast enough. I've been roasting them in batches — halved, tossed with olive oil and garlic, slow-roasted at 300 for two hours until they're concentrated and sweet and collapsing into themselves — and freezing them for winter sauces. Sofia helps me pick them every morning. She has a system: she checks the color, tests the firmness with a gentle squeeze (I taught her this, and she does it with the care of a surgeon), and places the ripe ones in a small basket that Elena gave her. The basket is purple. Sofia chose it. It holds approximately twelve tomatoes, which she counts every time.

Diego's contribution to the garden: pulling up a pepper plant by the roots on Tuesday. He was trying to "help pick" and instead uprooted an entire serrano plant. He held it up to me like a trophy and said, "Got it!" I replanted the serrano (it survived, barely) and had a conversation with my son about the difference between picking and destroying. He nodded solemnly, then tried to pull up the basil. We're working on it.

Summer is long and hot and full. The grill smokes at dawn. The garden grows. The kids get taller. The days blur together in a haze of heat and food and the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from loving your life so hard it wears you out.

Sofia’s purple basket can only hold twelve tomatoes at a time, but the plants don’t care — they just keep going. After a few weeks of roasting batches and squirreling them away in the freezer, the obvious move revealed itself: roasted tomato soup. Everything that makes those slow-roasted tomatoes so good — the concentrated sweetness, the garlic, the olive oil — translates straight into a bowl of something that tastes like summer even in January. This is the recipe I’m scaling up while the harvest lasts.

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 2 hrs 20 min | Total Time: 2 hrs 35 min | Servings: 6

Ingredients

3 lbs cherry or Roma tomatoes, halved
1 medium yellow onion, cut into wedges
8 cloves garlic, unpeeled
3 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes (optional)
2 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup heavy cream or half-and-half (optional)
Fresh basil, for serving

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Heat oven to 300°F. Arrange tomato halves cut-side up on a large rimmed baking sheet along with onion wedges and unpeeled garlic cloves. Drizzle with 2 tablespoons olive oil, season with salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes if using.
Slow-roast. Roast for 2 hours, until tomatoes are collapsed, deeply caramelized, and beginning to shrivel at the edges. Remove from oven and let cool slightly.
Prep the garlic. Squeeze roasted garlic cloves out of their skins and add to a large pot or Dutch oven with the tomatoes and onion, scraping in all the juices from the baking sheet.
Build the soup. Set the pot over medium heat. Add tomato paste and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Pour in broth and balsamic vinegar. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook for 15 minutes to meld flavors.
Blend. Use an immersion blender to puree the soup until smooth, or carefully transfer in batches to a stand blender. For an ultra-silky texture, pass through a fine mesh strainer.
Finish and adjust. Stir in cream if using and remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil. Taste and adjust salt. Ladle into bowls and top with fresh basil and a drizzle of olive oil.

Nutrition (per serving)

Roasted Tomato Soup — When the Garden Wins, You Make Soup