At the Minneapolis Farmers Market last weekend, we purchased a bag full of very ripe tomatoes and lots of fresh basil to make a large platter of sliced, fresh tomatoes topped with slices of fresh mozzarella cheese and fresh basil leaves--an easy summer salad for a crowd.
With the tomatoes and basil we had left over, I made Creamy Tomato-Basil Soup from the Fine Cooking website.
I puréed the soup right in the soup pot, using a hand-held immersion blender so that I wouldn’t have to pour the hot soup into a blender container as the recipe directed. At this point, the soup was a rich red color and was very thick, without having to add any thickeners to it.
Even after I added the 1 cup heavy cream to the blended, cooked tomato mixture in the pot, our soup was still redder than the canned counterpart. Strips of fresh basil leaves on top tasted great, gave a nice finished appearance and used up more of the fresh basil leaves.
If you prefer chunky tomato soup, here is a recipe for Chunky Tomato-Basil Soup. It calls for canned tomatoes which are great to use when the juicy, fresh tomatoes are not available in the winter.
The quickest way to get to a nice Creamy Tomato Basil soup is open a can of Progresso!