How to cook the perfect Roasted Tomato Soup

Cooking time: 80 minutes

Serves four people

Ah, tomato soup! It’s the only soup which is equally great from a tin or slowly cooked at home from fresh ingredients. It’s the iconic soup that inspired Andy Warhol and the American Pop Art revolution, and it’s a simple, delicious, homely treat that can be enjoyed any time of the year. Although it is probably best eaten with a hunk of buttered bread and a block of cheese on a cold day, it is also delicious cold, as eaten in Spain in the form of gazpacho.

Tomato brings back memories of both home family cooking, as well as the freedom of student dinners (served with piles of toast, of course), and it’s dead easy to cook and get right every time. This recipe is inspired by a classic Italian dish, and the combination of sweet, roasted tomatoes and rich, creamy mascarpone is to die for.

What you’ll need:

• About one kilogram of very ripe, red tomatoes
• One tablespoon of balsamic vinegar
• Three tablespoons of olive oil
• A teaspoon of caster sugar
• One large, finely chopped carrot
• One large, finely chopped white onion
• A piece of thyme and two bay leaves, tied together
• Two cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• One tablespoon of tomato puree
• Six hundred millilitres of vegetable stock
• Two tablespoons of mascarpone cheese

Method:

First

Heat the oven to about 170 degrees centigrade. Peel and halve your tomatoes, and lay them, cut side up, on a baking tray. Drizzle the tomatoes with the balsamic vinegar, and approximately one tablespoon of olive oil. Season with salt, pepper, and your caster sugar, and roast in the oven for one hour until semi-dry and bubbling away nicely. Set aside to cool.

Second

Heat up your remaining oil, and soften your diced onion and carrots gently for about ten minutes. Chuck in your herbs and garlic, and cook for a further minute. Following this, stir in your tomato puree, tip in your roasted tomatoes and all their juice, and pour the stock over the lot of it.

Third

Season with salt and pepper, and bring it to a gentle boil. After a minute, turn the heat down again, and simmer for ten minutes.

Last

Now it is time to remove your tied herbs and stir in the mascarpone cheese. Mix well, then blitz it all up with a hand blender. If you want a smoother soup, you can pass it through a sieve with a wooden spoon, but this isn’t really necessary. Serve with a dollop of mascarpone, and a sprig of thyme, and enjoy!

Wine pairing for Roasted Tomato Soup

This roasted tomato and mascarpone soup is a real treat as a starter or a light lunch, and what better way to top it all off, than with a good glass of wine? Tomato based dishes can be a little difficult to pair with wines, as tomatoes are sweet and packed full of acidity, and have some subtlety to their flavour which can easily clash with many wine styles.

If you match a non-acidic wine with fresh tomato dishes, the wine is going to end up being flat and lifeless on your palate.

To make things more complicated with this dish, we have a big dollop of mascarpone cheese in the mix, so we need a wine that can stand up to the acidity of the tomato, while cutting through the fat of the cheese. For me, the best wines for this would be a dry, crisp white wine, such as an Albarino.

Albarino is a beautifully acidic Spanish wine, bursting with freshness and hints of peach and grapefruit, making it a bold, yet elegant accompaniment for tomato and mascarpone soup.

That's it! You can now beat the cold winter weather and thaw out your taste buds with our easy-to-follow roasted tomato soup recipe paired with the perfect wine!

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