This recipe for a creamy tomato soup requires no dairy-free milk or dairy-free cream. Instead, the creaminess for this soup comes from the addition of potatoes. Potato adds a rich, creaminess to blended soups, without having to rely on any dairy-free replacements, which may contain allergens for those with allergies. I really enjoyed serving this with a cheese toastie for a classic comfort food lunch. I am fond of creamy tomato soup, as that’s what I would eat if I was poorly as a child. So this has a real element of childhood nostalgia for me. This recipe also contains five different vegetables, so it’s a good way to sneak them in without anyone really noticing. (I realise tomatoes are technically a fruit, but they’re treated mostly as a vegetable, so I’m classing them as a vegetable)
Serves; Four Cook time; 30 minutes
You’ll need;
- One tablespoon of oil
- One large carrot, peeled and chopped roughly 120g
- A couple of sticks of celery, chopped, roughly 120g
- One medium sized onion, chopped roughly 120g
- One medium sized potato, peeled and diced, roughly 300g
- Two cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped
- A 400g tin of tomatoes
- One litre of hot vegetable stock
- One and a half teaspoons of both dried basil and dried oregano
- Salt and black pepper to taste
Method;
- Begin by heating the oil in a large saucepan over a medium heat. Once it’s warmed up, add in the carrot, celery and onion. Give them five minutes to soften
- Next add in the potato and stir it through the vegetables. Give everything another ten minutes to soften
- Then add the garlic and mix it through. Allow to garlic to heat up and become fragrant, this should take a couple of minutes
- Add the tin of tomatoes, hot vegetable stock and herbs. Stir everything together until well combined. Season to taste with salt and black pepper
- Place a lid on the saucepan and leave it to simmer for ten to fifteen minutes. Give it a stir every now and then to make sure nothing is sticking
- Finally remove the soup from the heat and blend until smooth. I like to use a hand/stick blender to do this. Spoon the creamy tomato soup into bowls and serve
I also was reminded of something my family did years ago. We would sometimes use a tin of creamy tomato soup to use in place of pasta sauce, for a pasta bake. When you slightly under-cook the pasta, it can absorb excess moisture from the soup as it bakes in the oven. I tried that out with this soup and it worked brilliantly. I slightly under-cooked the pasta, stirred it through the soup, then put it into an oven safe dish. I then added a generous amount of dairy-free cheese and baked it for almost half an hour. It came out really well, and it was fun to re-create a non-vegan dish with my own homemade creamy tomato soup
