Super Tomato Soup

Super Tomato Soup

This soup was born when I had my soup business. I was on a quest to make a tomato 🍅 soup that did not contain cream or sugar. After many test batches, I finally started giving it to friends to try, and it was an instant hit! I was originally going to call it tomato & rice, but one of my friends insisted that name didn’t do it justice, so I called it “Super Tomato💪🍅”. It’s a tomato soup but amped up with the addition of Parmesan cheese, rice, lentils, and spinach 😋.

This recipe is actually a revamp of the original. If the soup was so great, you might be wondering why I’ve revamped it. When I closed my business and started making this soup in normal-size batches again, it never tasted as good to me as it did when I made it in big batches. With this new and improved version, the taste is how I remember it, and I’ve also simplified the cooking process. 

Here are the changes: I adjusted the ratio of carrot and celery to make it a bit sweeter. The addition of tomato paste gives it a stronger tomato flavor. It now calls for canned, whole tomatoes, which I find to be more consistent from brand to brand than crushed or diced tomatoes. The rice and lentils get added just before you eat it as opposed to when you finish cooking it. This is so they don’t absorb all the liquid and turn the consistency to mush. And finally, the Parmesan just gets stirred in as opposed to blended in with the immersion blender. (Cleaning the immersion blender and super tomato soup pots was always the job in my kitchen that no one wanted! Though I can’t guarantee that there won’t still be a little bit of cheese stuck to your pot 🙄.)

One last thing, people love grilled cheese with tomato soup, but I never felt that it was a good pairing for this tomato soup since there’s already so much happening in it. By leaving the rice and lentils on the side, I realized that without them, it makes a fabulous pairing with grilled cheese! 

Enjoy! And if you make it, please give me a shout to let me know what you think!

Super Tomato Soup

• Author: Emily
• Prep Time: 1/2 hour
• Cook Time: 1/2 hour
• Total Time: 1 hour
• Yield: 6 servings 1x
• Category: Soup
• Method: Easy
• Cuisine: American
• Diet: Gluten Free

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Ingredients

Scale 1x2x3x

• About 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
• 6.5 oz carrots (185 grams – about 3 carrots) diced 
• 5 oz onion (140 grams – about 1 medium onion), diced
• 3.5 oz celery (100 grams – about 2 stalks), diced
• 10 grams (3 or 4 cloves) garlic, minced
• 40 grams/2 tablespoons tomato paste 
• 2 cans (400 grams/14 oz each) canned, whole, plum tomatoes
• 2 oz (scant ⅓ cup/55 grams) rice – I used to use a combination of short grain brown and wild rice. In the UK, I’ve been using a red camargue & wild mix that I get at Waitrose
• 2 oz (scant ⅓ cup/55 grams) red lentils 
• 3 oz grated Parmesan cheese (ideally freshly grated) 
• 2.5 oz fresh spinach
• 1 ½ teaspoons salt
• 5 ¼ cups veggie broth (4 cups for the soup and 1 ¼ cups for the lentils/rice)
• freshly ground pepper and additional salt to taste

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Instructions

You can find a quick tutorial of this soup in the “demos” section of stories at Instagram. 

1. Heat the olive oil on medium in a large pot. Add the onions, carrots, celery, and 1 ¼ teaspoons salt and sauté on low/medium heat for about 20 minutes until soft. If the veggies are sticking to the bottom of the pot during cooking, you can turn the heat to low. During the last 3 minutes of cooking, add in the garlic. Add in the tomato paste and cook for about  2 minutes stirring frequently. Add the tomatoes and break them up to release the juice. Cook for another 2 or 3 minutes stirring occasionally.
2. Add in 4 cups of veggie broth and bring to a boil. Then turn down the heat so the soup is simmering, cover, and cook for another 10 minutes. 
3. In a separate small pot, add the rice, lentils, ¼ teaspoon of salt and 1 ¼ cup of broth. Bring to a boil, then turn the heat all the way down and simmer, covered, for 20 minutes. 
4. Turn the heat off on the large pot of soup and puree with an immersion blender for about 2-3 minutes until the soup is smooth and no chunks remain. If the soup feels very thick, you can add some veggie broth. Add in the spinach and blend it a few times with the immersion blender to chop it up. Make sure you don’t over puree the spinach as you still want it there for another texture in the soup. 
5. Taste the rice and lentils for doneness. If the rice is still hard, cook for another few minutes. *Don’t worry about the lentils getting over cooked. Red lentils cook quickly and dissolve in the soup, but they will still add another textural element. If you still have a bit of liquid left over, strain it out (you can actually just add it to the soup). If you’re serving the soup immediately, stir in the rice and lentils. Otherwise, place in a separate container and add when you eat the soup.
6. Serve with extra grated Parmesan or a dollop of pesto on top.

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Notes

Soup freezes really well, and this recipe can easily be doubled. I recommend freezing it without the rice and lentils in it as they will turn very mushy. Just make a fresh batch of that stuff when you thaw it.