Tomato soup with noodles
Summer tomatoes boiled whole for two hours, with the cooking water as the base of the soup. Two methods — clear or rustic. Potatoes and noodles cooked separately.
About this recipe
This works best in summer, with fully ripe tomatoes — the ones that smell of tomato through the stem, before you cut into them. That is where both the fragrance and the base of the soup come from.
The tomatoes are boiled whole, stems and all, covered with water, for two hours. That water is not thrown away — the tomatoes have given it everything they had. It is the base of the soup, not leftover cooking liquid.
From there, two routes. The rustic method: sautéed vegetables that stay in the soup. The clear method: a second vegetable soup, strained completely and combined with the tomato one. I prefer the clear version.
Ingredients
- For the tomato soup
- Water, enough to cover
- 3 kg fully ripe summer tomatoes, whole, stems left on (or as many as fit in your largest pan)
- To finish
- 4 tbsp tomato purée
- 800 g tinned tomato passata (a good one)
- Salt — ½ to 1 level tbsp per 1.5 l of soup, added gradually
- 1 bunch of fresh basil, chopped (or frozen basil in ice cubes)
- Additionally, for the rustic method
- Sunflower oil, enough to cover the base of the pan
- Hot water, to adjust the consistency
- Additionally, for the clear method
- 3 l water (at least)
- 1 tbsp black peppercorns
- 4 bay leaves
- 5 dried dates
- Separately
- 300 g dried noodles, or 300-400 g fresh homemade noodles (flour and water only) — or short pasta or rice, see the notes
- 750 g potatoes, peeled and cubed
- Vegetables (for both methods)
- 2 carrots
- 2 onions
- 2 peppers
- ¼ celeriac
- 1 parsnip and/or parsley root — optional
Method
1. Boil the tomatoes (2 hours)
Wash the tomatoes well and put them whole, with their stems on, into your largest pan. Cover with water, bring to the boil and let them cook for a full two hours.
Do not throw the water away. The tomatoes release their fragrance into it, and this is the base of the whole soup.
2. Pass through a sieve
Push the boiled tomatoes through a sieve straight back into the water they cooked in. The stems and skins stay behind in the sieve and get discarded. That is your first soup.
3. The clear method (preferred)
In a separate pan, put the roughly chopped vegetables together with the peppercorns, bay leaves and dried dates. Cover with at least 2-3 l of water and simmer for 1½ to 2 hours.
Strain completely. Nothing stays in the soup — not the vegetables, not the dates, not the peppercorns, not the bay. Only the liquid.
Combine the two soups.
Both soups can be made the evening before and left overnight to cool.
4. The rustic method (alternative)
Chop the carrots, onions, peppers, celeriac and parsnip. Pour enough oil into the pan to cover the base and heat it — once it starts to smoke faintly, add the vegetables and fry them for 5-10 minutes.
Cover them with the tomato soup and simmer for a further 40-50 minutes, until the vegetables are soft. Here the vegetables stay in the soup, and the consistency is adjusted with hot water added as you go.
5. Tomato purée and passata
Once the two soups are combined (clear method) or the vegetables have simmered in the tomato soup (rustic method), bring everything to the boil.
Add 2-4 tbsp of tomato purée and the 800 g tin of passata. Stir well and bring back to the boil.
Add the salt gradually, tasting as you go: roughly ½ to 1 level tablespoon per 1.5 l of soup. At 6-7 l that comes to 2-4 tablespoons in total, but the difference between sweet and sharp tomatoes is considerable — taste before you add the last of it.
6. Potatoes and noodles, separately
Boil the cubed potatoes in separate water until soft when pierced with a fork. Drain.
Cook the noodles separately, following the packet instructions — or 3-4 minutes if they are fresh and homemade. Drain.
7. Basil and serving
Take the pan off the heat and stir in the chopped basil. Its aroma is lost if it boils.
Add the potatoes and noodles only once the soup has cooled. Dropped into hot soup, they carry on cooking in the pan and fall apart. The alternative, if you are serving straight away: put them into the bowl and pour the hot soup over them.
Notes and tips
Why the tomato water is kept
This is the one part of the recipe you cannot improvise around. Two hours of simmering draws everything out of the tomatoes — acidity, sweetness, fragrance — and puts it into the water. Strain that liquid away and you are left with tomato pulp and a soup built out of something else.
Summer tomatoes, nothing else
The test is simple: smell the stem before you wash the tomatoes. If it smells, the tomato is good. Glasshouse tomatoes picked green make a flat soup that no amount of tomato purée will rescue. Out of season, the recipe is not worth making.
The dates
Three to five dried dates in the vegetable soup balance the acidity of the tomatoes without adding sugar. They are strained out at the end along with everything else — they do not stay in the soup, but their sweetness does.
Clear or rustic
The clear method gives a clean soup where each flavour reads separately. The rustic one gives a thicker, chunkier soup with vegetables in it, and needs more water along the way to keep the consistency right. Both start from the same tomato soup.
Short pasta or rice instead of noodles
Any short pasta works just as well — orzo, small shells, stelline — in the same quantity as dried noodles. Or rice, at 150-200 g dry, less because it swells more. The rule stays the same: cooked separately, added once the soup has cooled. Rice in particular needs keeping out of the pan until the last moment, or it breaks down and thickens the soup.
Shop-bought noodles
Many packet egg noodles contain egg, as the name suggests — check the label, or make them at home from flour and water. For soup that is all you need.
Making it the night before
The two soups take nearly four hours between them, but very little attention. Made in the evening and left to cool overnight, all that remains the next day is the finishing, the potatoes and the noodles — 30 minutes.