Some Recipes

Quick Tomato Soup from Juice

Recipe Submitted by Donna ..|.. Index | Soup / Salad / Side

Classic Tomato Soup

Because I wanted a recipe that was more like ordinary tomato soup, but homemade, I developed this recipe. This soup has a butter and flour base which causes it to be a suitable thickness for soup. It is not too thick to drink to from a mug and it's not so runny that a person would think it is warmed up tomato juice, not that there is anything wrong with warmed up tomato juice!

Ingredients

• One 46 ounce bottled or canned 100% tomato juice
• 4 Tablespoons butter (unsalted butter if you have it)
• 4 Tablespoons flour
• 1/2 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper powder (or your favorite hot pepper powder)
• 1/4 cup of cream or milk or evaporated milk

In a saucepan, melt the butter over med-high heat. When the butter has melted, add the flour and stir to blend out the lumps. Allow the butter and flour mixture to simmer for a couple of minutes. Open the tomato juice and pour some (approximately 1/3 of the juice) into the pan. Stir to blend with the flour and butter mixture and then add the rest of the tomato juice. Stir in the seasonings (onion powder. garlic powder, black pepper, and cayenne pepper). Allow the soup to come to a boil, not a hard boil but more like a simmer. Stir every minute or two. After around 6-8 minutes (or when the tomato juice has thickened a little bit from the butter and flour) add the cream or milk or evaporated milk. Stir. Heat until you see a simmer begin. Turn off heat under pan and serve the soup. Refrigerate leftovers.

 

- - - Wheat-Free Tomato Soup- - -

I created this recipe because I needed a tomato soup that was quick, easy, and wheat-free. You will notice that most of the ingredients are dried and I used dried ingredients because I wanted this recipe to be quick to make, no cutting or dicing or sautéing. Obviously if you substitute fresh for the dried, then it will no longer be quick. Lastly, I want to say that how well the soup tastes depends on the ingredients and I suppose that is true of everything, however; try to use good tasting tomato juice.

Ingredients

• One 64 ounce bottle of 100% tomato juice
• 1 Tablespoon butter
• 2 Tablespoons corn starch (or rice flour)
• 1/2 teaspoon onion powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons sugar (feel free to omit the sugar)
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 teaspoon celery powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt (taste the soup first, it might not need the salt)
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Directions

Pour some of the tomato juice from the bottle into a 4-quart saucepan. Add the butter to the pan. Turn on the heat under the saucepan to medium-high.

Add the rest of the ingredients (except salt) to the remaining tomato juice in the bottle - use a funnel if you have one. Put the lid on the bottle and shake the bottle of juice and dry ingredients until everything is mixed well. Open the bottle and pour all of it into the saucepan.

Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 5-10 minutes or until all of the dry ingredients are rehydrated. Add salt if needed. Serve. Store the rest of the soup in the refrigerator.

-- Juice in Metal Cans. If the tomato juice is in a can instead of a bottle, mix the dry ingredients with the tomato juice in the pan while the juice is still room temperature.

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Homemade, Almost Everything

When my garden does well, I use juice from home grown tomatoes. When I plant onions, I will dry them; same with garlic. I haven't grown celery in a few years, so my dried celery is made from fresh grocery store celery.

Skinning Cherry Tomatoes - More often than not, cherry tomatoes are extraordinarily productive in my garden. This is wonderful but they are small and skinning cherry tomatoes in the typical way would be messy. I came up with this freezer method of skinning them --

1. Wash the cherry tomatoes
2. Put them in gallon sized bags (or your preferred containers)
3. Freeze them
4. Either after they are frozen solid or when you need to use them, take out a container of frozen cherry tomatoes and pour them all in a sink of HOT tap water.
5. Work Quickly- take each one and squeeze it until the skin slides off. This usually happens almost instantly.

Juicing Fresh Tomatoes and The Juicemate - When I have many tomatoes of any size, I blanch them all in small batches in boiling water and then I run them through my juicemate. The Juicemate does a very good job of separating the seed and skin from tomatoes. It takes some work to clean the screen and dry it at the end of the day. Washing the plastic parts is easy, but the screen is difficult, but not impossible. The excellent job it does makes it worth the trouble. To clean the screen just keep rubbing it on the inside and the outside with a soapy wash cloth again and again until all the little particles are removed from the holes. The metal parts can rust, so be sure to dry thoroughly. To make sure of this, I set the metal parts in a warm oven until they are bone dry. I store the metal parts in a bag of rice.