best tomato soup

One of the cooking magazines I get - probably my favorite, right now - is called Cook's Country. (website is here. They're a publication of America's Test Kitchens, and they do test a lot of things (they usually rate at least one kitchen utensil and one ingredient per issue; and interestingly, often it's NOT the most expensive one that's the most highly rated).

One of the reasons I like the magazine so much is that they describe the experimentation process that leads up to the development of their recipes - how some things don't work, how the different ingredients lead to different properties in the finished dish. Kitchen science, really, and that makes it interesting to me - I always like seeing the thought process that goes into making stuff. (A long time ago I said I didn't care as much for the knitting/craft blogs that were just pretty pictures of finished stuff; what I found more interesting was the person's descriptions of why they chose the yarn they did, and how and why they modified the pattern (if they did), and what gave them problems with the pattern and what they found satisfying about it).

Also, the recipes - at least, those I have made - are good.

This month's issue had an excellent one - a tomato soup made using canned diced tomatoes. It's a bit fiddlier than some recipes (you save back part of the tomatoes, and you cook the rest just until they caramelize, and then you puree the finished soup), but it's extremely good.

One thing the recipe developer noted that s/he found surprising: the needed ingredient to fix an "off" taste in the soup was baking soda.

I don't find that odd at all. Lots of the older recipes you see for tomato soup call for a very small amount (I think this recipe - with 2, 28 ounce cans of tomatoes - had 1/2 tsp). It neutralizes a bit of the acid and also, in this case, probably softens the remaining cell walls (or, more likely, the middle lamellae holding the cells together) and makes the soup easier to puree.

I'm not sharing the recipe - I'm unsure about copyright with a current publication - but if you can get your hands on the Jan/Feb 2011 issue of Cook's Country, the recipe is in there. I dare say it's worth the price of the magazine on the newsstand if you don't subscribe. (There's also a pot roast recipe, and "Sunday gravy" (an Italian meat sauce), and pastitso, and a basic yellow cake recipe, among others). (You can request a free trial issue on the website, but I have no idea whether it's a current issue or not)