The Easiest F*cking Tomato Soup

Is this a SOUP newsletter now?

Besties, it seemed like you enjoyed the Best F*cking Butternut Squash Soup recipe last month. Welp, it’s not getting any less soup season out there, right? So, I have another recipe for your mouths and this one is so stupid easy, you probably have all the ingredients and equipment in your kitchen already.

I have love, love, loved tomato soup allllll of my life. I am told that when I was a toddler, I called it “Make a Mess Soup” because every time I had it, which was often, someone told me I was making a mess. ADORABLE, NO? Then, when I was a wee lonely only child with working parents, my Nana used to sit me on the lower level of one of our living room end tables with a TV tray in front of me for grilled cheese and tomato soup while watching barely visible cartoons on a snowy UHF channel after school. And even though I would never have home access to cable television with clearly visible cartoons until I was an adult living in New York City, table seat grilled cheese with a side of tomato soup was, honestly, my happy place. What’s not to love about that combo? It’s basically deconstructed (and cheap) pizza.

I have had a lot of tomato soups, from Campbell’s, to fancy restaurants where I ordered it as a starter for an expensive meal because somebody with a lot of money was paying and I was gonna get all the courses. The only time I haven’t enjoyed a bowl of tomato soup was once when I was about 7 and my mom and Nana went out to some weight loss hypnosis group they had joined and my dad, to his credit, remembered kids need to be fed and also to his credit, remembered I loved tomato soup. Not to his credit, though, was when he set the bowl down in front of the me and it was uncharacteristically pink and I was like, “Dad, what the fuck is this shit?” Just kidding! I would never have dared. But I did dare to ask, “Um, why does it look like that?” To which he responded, “It’s bisque. It’s tomato soup, but I made it with milk. Try it.” Reader, I tried it. It was…guh-ross. Sorry, Dad.

Now, commercially available tomato soup has definitely come a long way from the familiar canned and condensed version that tasted exactly like the sauce of Spaghetti-O’s we all know from childhood. Tomato soup that comes in those shelf-stable boxes is pretty good! But I think my take tastes fresher and brighter and it’s so customizable and so VERY SIMPLE that I vastly prefer it over anything else. Here’s what you need!

A big can of canned tomatoes. They can be whole. They can be diced. They can have other things in them like peppers/onions/chilis. Whatever can you like! Just make sure it’s one of them biggies and not a teeny. Then you also need…

Seasoning! I love the flavor of oregano, so that’s what I usually use. You could also add basil. Or dill. Or rosemary. Or Thyme. Or chives. You could add parsley or cilantro, if unlike me, you are not allergic to those. (I won’t die if I eat it, my lips just get swollen. It actually looks kind of hot. But it’s uncomfortable.) You could also add garlic, which I also seem to be allergic to now. (I won’t die if I eat it. I just get a headache and it doesn’t make me look any hotter, so it’s a lose/lose for me.) You could add paprika, chili powder or cayenne. Really, anything that sounds good to you! It can be dried, but if you’re a fresh herb kinda bitch, good for you and go for it!

Now, if you already know this, bless you, but for those who don’t, your soup is almost undoubtedly gonna need salt and pepper because it is a food and all foods almost undoubtedly need salt and pepper. So many people are out here thinking they aren’t great cooks and honey, the problem could well be that you are afraid of salt and pepper! I don’t know what pepper ever did to any of us to deserve this, but many of us were raised to be terrified of sprinkling some salt onto our food, right about the time weight loss hypnosis meetings were all the rage. Listen, if your doctor told you to cut back on salt, definitely remain terrified of it. But if you are healthy and your doctor never told you that, please salt your food a little so you can feel joy! THAT BEING SAID, I don’t salt until the end because I want to be able to taste it as I do so I don’t add too much. I like all of my cooking to have a salinity comparable to tears but not as salty as sweat. YMMV!

You also need…

Fat! It can be a chunk of luxurious butter, like this. Or it can be a few good glugs of olive oil. Do I measure it? No. I said this was easy and if I made you use a measuring spoon you would have to then wash it, making this that much less easy. Nobody ever died from an imprecise amount of olive oil, so just eyeball it.

I use butter because that’s also how I finish pasta that I have just sauced. I know I have bragged on the podcast about my pasta saucing technique and it remains undefeated, so maybe I’ll demonstrate that one day, but NOT NOW! We are making soup and we’re almost done!

I supposed you could skip this step if you really wanted to, but again, I remind you of “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” which are truly the necessary components if you want any dish to come anywhere near hitting the spot. (I’m not a profesh chef, but maybe we change it to Fat, Acid, Salt, Heat so we can use the easy-to-remember acronym FASH? Is that easy to remember? Like, it’s short for fashion? But food fashion. Or does it sound too much like it’s short for fascism? Ugh. SFAH it still is, I guess!)

Ok, that’s the whole recipe. Now you’re gonna open everything up and dump it in a…

Blender! At this point, if you have any last minute brainstorms of things you want to toss in there, do it now. A bit of onion. A chunk of parm. Red wine. I’m not your boss. Live your life!

Ok, I’m not snobby about kitchen equipment at all. I’ve had built in Sub-Zero fridges and Whirlpool fridges and a Whirlpool will keep your kombucha just as cold as something ten times the price. However, I do love my blender so much. It’s a VitaMix I paid wheyyyyy too much for after witnessing a demonstration at Costco where they blended rock hard beets into juice or something. When we moved out to Los Angeles, our VitaMix was somehow left behind and my son took it to his apartment, because I guess college guys are really into banana daiquiris or whatever? Anyway, after a couple years of begging and pleading for him to bring our blender back to us and also maybe relocate himself along with it, we were all reunited on the west coast and the old girl is going strong.

You DO NOT NEED a $300 blender to make this soup, though, because it isn’t rock hard beets. You could also use a $15 blender you got at ShopRite. Or a handheld immersion blender. Or probably even a food processor that’s been sitting in your cabinet and you never use it for anything else. You could probably use a potato masher or ricer, if I’m being honest, but that seems like a real recipe for “Make a Mess Soup” and maybe you should just go to ShopRite and get that $15 blender at that point. You deserve to own a blender.

One thing about the VitaMix, though, which I learned at that Costco demonstration, is that the motor is so powerful and fast that when you blend something in it, after a couple of minutes, it will actually start to heat up whatever you’re blending! It gets hot enough that you can use it to cook raw eggs!!! Which I absolutely do not recommend because blended cooked eggs have a repulsive texture that makes tomato bisque seem edible. BUT, it makes perfect tomato soup, so in my house, I just blend everything for about 5 minutes, at which point, it is piping hot!

Listen, I made a little movie of the steaming blender full of tomato soup, but Substack does not support adding video to posts like this. I don’t know why. Just picture a blender container full of delicious tomatoey soup with steam rising from it.

If your blender situation isn’t powerful enough to heat up your food, good news, you can always dump it in a pan to heat on your stovetop or put it in a bowl and microwave it like normal people warm up normal soup every day. That is literally it! Oh, except once it is warm, taste it. Add salt, taste and repeat until it’s good.

You know what I also don’t have a picture of? The soup in a bowl, beautiful and ready to eat. Because I’m not just bad at being a fashion influencer, I’m also bad at being a food influencer. But, again, picture it. You can garnish it with just about anything you like. I’ve sprinkled croutons, cheese, herbs, and even floated pickle slices in it. This time, I put pieces of these crunchy puff pastry cheese twist bread stick things we had. You know the ones I’m talking about, I’m sure. Anyway, I was obviously trying to evoke the vibes of grilled cheese to go with my soup and it totally worked.

Even though it probably took you all afternoon to read this, making the actual soup takes 8 minutes, tops, and that includes washing the blender afterward. I hope you try it and I want to hear all about how, like Randy Jackson used to always say on American Idol, you made it your own, dawg.