Ingredients:
- 1-1.25 kg ripe tomatoes
- 1 medium onion
- 1 carrot
- 1 celery stick
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 2 tsp tomato purée
- pinch of sugar
- 2 bay leaves
- 1.2 litres of hot vegetable stock (made with boiling water and 2 stock cubes)
- salt
- pepper
Process:
- Firstly, prepare your vegetables. Wash the tomatoes, cut each of them into quarters and slice off any hard cores (they don’t soften during cooking and you would get hard bits in the soup at the end). Peel the onion and carrot and chop them into small pieces. Chop the celery roughly the same size.
- Spoon the oil into a large heavy-based pan and heat it over a low heat.
- Hold your hand over the pan until you can feel the heat rising from the oil, then tip in the onion, carrot and celery and mix them together with a wooden spoon.
- Still with the heat low, cook the vegetables until they are soft and faintly coloured. Make sure you stir them two or three times so they cook evenly and don’t stick to the bottom of the pan.
- Squirt in about 2 tsp of tomato purée and stir it around so it turns the vegetables red.
- Add the tomatoes, sprinkle in a good pinch of sugar, grind in a little black pepper, then tear each bay leaf into a few pieces and throw them into the pan.
- Stir to mix everything together, put the lid on the pan and let the tomatoes stew over a low heat for 10 minutes until they shrink down in the pan and their juices flow nicely. From time to time, give the pan a good shake – this will keep everything well mixed.
- Slowly pour in the stock, stirring at the same time to mix it with the vegetables.
- Turn up the heat as high as it will go and wait until everything is bubbling, then turn the heat down to low again and put the lid back on the pan.
- Cook gently for 25 minutes, stirring a couple of times. At the end of cooking the tomatoes will have broken down and be very slushy looking.
- Remove the pan from the heat, take the lid off and stand back for a few seconds or so while the steam escapes, then fish out the pieces of bay leaf and throw them away.
- Ladle the soup into your blender and blitz until the soup is smooth, then pour the puréed soup into a large bowl. Repeat with the soup that is left in the pan.
- Pour the puréed soup back into the pan and reheat it over a medium heat for a few minutes, stirring occasionally until you can see bubbles breaking gently on the surface.
- Taste a spoonful and add a pinch or two of salt if you think the soup needs it, plus more pepper and sugar if you like.
- If the colour is not a deep enough red for you, add another teaspoon of tomato purée and stir until it dissolves.
- Ladle into bowls and serve. Or sieve and serve chilled with some cream swirled in.
