Rich and hearty tomato soup.
The oven is hot to 350 for the croutons
then it goes up to 425, 450 center rack for the tomatoes.
For the crouton, I start with a very large skillet
and about a half a loaf of stale peasant style crusty bread.
Oh, my little burner cover isn't on.
There we go.
We're gonna heat the oil
with a couple of cloves of crushed garlic.
This is our garlic from our garden from this year.
Some of the last of it actually.
We're starting to run out of it.
So that's gonna infuse in the olive oil and butter.
So now we're just gonna toss.
I diced the stale bread and see, about four,
four and a half cups evenly coats the bottom of the skillet.
So that's what I go for every time.
So now we're gonna add a little black or red pepper to this.
I put a little black pepper on my croutons
in case I use them in Caesar
and we're not toasting them on the stove top.
We're toasting then in the oven.
I just wanted to put the heat under it
so we get the flavor in the olive oil and dab of butter.
It all smells like garlic now.
And now I'm going to sprinkle the top of that
with grated Parm or Romano or both.
Into the oven she goes until it gets nice and toasty.
Okay, so this is perfection.
What we want is just toasted, not over toasted.
I would let a crouton go even a little bit further
but we're gonna grind this up into our soup.
Turn the oven temp up to 425 or 450.
We're quick roasting, not slow roasting tomatoes here.
So let's start with the tomatoes.
All I did was core the top as you can see here
by choking up on the bat and using your paring knife
then I cut each tomato of any kind.
There's a beefsteak tomato there.
These are some vine tomatoes.
No tomato tastes great in the winter.
That's just the way it is.
That's why we're doing this.
So I'm just halving them.
I scattered a red onion, yellow onion, white onion.
Doesn't matter.
A sliced onion onto a parchment lined baking sheet.
Now, I'm gonna add a few fat cloves of crushed garlic.
That's really just four cloves.
They're just big clothes
and they broke up when I whacked 'em.
You just hit 'em with the side of your knife and that's it.
You don't have to bother to chop it
'cause we're gonna grind this whole thing up
then I'm gonna season that with a little dry oregano
or you can add some fresh or you can use thyme.
Thyme is lovely with this too and then a little red pepper
if you like things a little spicy.
A little touch a black pepper if you like it less spicy.
No pepper if you don't like anything spicy, okay?
Now, this right here, this combo
gets olive oil drizzled over the top
the onions and garlic, okay,
then we put the tomatoes directly on top of the onions
and all their natural juices will fall down on top of them.
Drizzle, drizzle.
One more salt.
Now we're gonna put this in the oven
until the skins brown and the tomatoes begin to slump.
That depends on how strong your oven is.
It took us about 30, 35 minutes last time we did this.
We'll see, also depends on the size of the tomato obviously.
And then I let them rest a bit
until I can start to pick at them
and I just pull the skins off.
The croutons, I put into the pot
and I added about two and a half or three cups
of stock, vegetable if you wanna keep this vegetarian,
chicken, beef, whatever you have on hand.
Take all of the juice.
See how I'm turning the pan sideways?
It's like a giant funnel.
Couple of leaves of sweet basil gets thrown into here
and we just start grinding this up.
If you wanna deepen the color, you can add tomato paste,
tomato sauce or tomato puree
to compensate for tomatoes being out of season
and then you just put the whole pot
of that beautiful soup on the table
and top it with a few more little baby leaves
of basil around the pot.