Tomato vegetable soup is the cheapest thing on this site and, made properly, one of the best. Bright, sweet and slightly acidic, thick with vegetables rather than pureed smooth, and built almost entirely from things that keep in a cupboard. It is a soup you can make on a night when you did not plan to make anything.

Difficulty is easy. About fifty minutes, most of it a gentle simmer.

The one thing worth knowing before you shop is that canned tomatoes are the right choice for most of the year, and that is not a compromise. Canning tomatoes are picked ripe and processed within hours. Supermarket fresh tomatoes in February were picked green, shipped hard, and ripened with ethylene gas, and they taste like it. Reach for fresh only in late summer when you can buy them locally.

This is also the only soup here that is vegetarian as written, and the only one under 300 calories a serving.

This makes four servings.

Equipment

Three pieces do the work here, and I stock all three.

• 5 Quarts Round Dutch Oven with Lid. Tomato is acidic and will strip flavor out of bare cast iron and pick up a metallic edge. An enameled pot has no such problem, which is why this recipe in particular wants one.
• Two-Tone XL Cutting Board, 18 by 12 Inch. This soup is almost entirely knife work. Six or seven vegetables diced roughly the same size is what makes it cook evenly, and that needs room.
• Large Capacity Stainless Steel Mixing Bowl with Scale. For crushing the canned tomatoes by hand, which you should do rather than blending them. Stainless will not stain or hold the smell the way plastic does with tomato.

You will also need a wooden spoon and a ladle.

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 large onion, diced
• 2 medium carrots, diced
• 2 ribs celery, diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 tablespoons tomato paste
• 1 can whole peeled tomatoes, 28 ounces
• 4 cups vegetable stock
• 1 medium zucchini, diced
• 1 cup green beans, cut in 1 inch lengths
• 1 cup frozen corn
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 pinch red pepper flakes
• 1 teaspoon red wine vinegar
• Salt and black pepper, to taste
• Fresh basil, torn, for serving

Method

Before you start

Set up your mise en place. Dice all the vegetables to roughly the same size, about half an inch. Even dice is the whole difference between a soup where everything is properly cooked and one where the carrots are hard and the zucchini has dissolved.

Buy whole peeled tomatoes, not diced. Diced tomatoes are treated with calcium chloride to help the pieces hold their shape, which is exactly what you do not want in a soup, because they stay stubbornly firm no matter how long you simmer them. Whole tomatoes break down properly.

Crush the tomatoes by hand. Tip the can into your bowl and squeeze them apart with your fingers, juice and all. Do not blend them. A blender aerates the tomatoes, turns them pale orange, and pulverizes the seeds, which adds bitterness you cannot season out.

Build the base

Sweat the aromatics. Heat the oil over medium and add the onion, carrot, and celery. Cook until softened and translucent, about 10 minutes. These three need the longest and they go in first for that reason.

Add the garlic and red pepper flakes. One minute, until the garlic is fragrant but not colored.

Cook the tomato paste until it darkens. Stir it in and keep it moving until it turns from bright red to brick, about 2 minutes. This is the most important step on the page and the one most often skipped. Raw tomato paste tastes tinny and sharp. Cooked, it goes sweet and deep and does more for this soup than any other single ingredient.

Simmer

Add the tomatoes, stock, and herbs. Pour in the crushed tomatoes with all their juice, the stock, bay leaf, and oregano. Bring to a simmer.

Simmer 20 minutes, uncovered. The soup will reduce slightly and the raw edge will come off the tomatoes. You will see the color deepen from bright red toward brick. That color change is your cue.

Add the quick vegetables in order. Green beans first for 5 minutes, then the zucchini for 4, then the corn for 2. Zucchini in particular collapses into mush if you add it at the start, and this staggering is why the vegetables in this soup still taste like themselves.

Finish and serve

Add the vinegar, then season. Stir in the red wine vinegar. Tomatoes are already acidic, so this is not about adding sourness; a small amount of a different acid sharpens the tomato flavor and makes the whole pot taste more like itself. Then salt and pepper to taste.

Taste for sweetness. If the tomatoes were sharp, a pinch of sugar rounds it out. A pinch, not a spoonful. Good canned tomatoes usually need none.

Rest, then serve. Ten minutes off the heat lets it settle. Torn basil over the top at the last moment, since basil cooked in the pot goes dark and tastes of hay.

Fresh tomatoes instead of canned

Worth doing in late summer and not worth doing the rest of the year. If you have good ripe tomatoes from a garden or a farm stand, this is the better soup. If you are looking at pale supermarket tomatoes in winter, the can wins and it is not close.

How much. About 2 1/2 pounds of ripe tomatoes replaces one 28 ounce can. Plum or Roma varieties are best, because they have more flesh and less water and seed.

Peel them, and use the boiling water trick. Score a shallow X in the base of each, drop them in boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds, then straight into ice water. The skins slip off. Tomato skins do not soften in a soup and end up as curls of tough film in the bowl.

Expect a thinner soup. Fresh tomatoes carry far more water than canned. Simmer 10 minutes longer, or add an extra tablespoon of tomato paste to compensate.

Roast them first if you have the oven on. Halved, cut side up, with oil and salt at 400F for 40 minutes. This drives off water and concentrates the sugars, and it is the single best thing you can do with tomatoes that are merely decent rather than excellent.

Making it creamy

This turns a chunky vegetable soup into something closer to a classic cream of tomato, and the two are different enough that you should choose one rather than splitting the difference.

Blend it first. Skip the zucchini, green beans, and corn entirely. Simmer the base as written, remove the bay leaf, and blend until completely smooth, working in batches and filling the blender no more than half full with hot liquid.

Add 1/2 to 1 cup of heavy cream and bring the pot to no more than 180F, where the surface barely shivers. Do not let it boil after the cream is in.

Watch for curdling, which is a real risk here and not with the other soups. Tomato is acidic, and acid plus heat will split dairy. Three things prevent it: use full fat heavy cream rather than milk or half and half, warm the cream slightly before it goes in rather than adding it cold, and keep the heat low afterward. Lower fat dairy curdles far more readily in an acidic soup.

A pinch of baking soda is the fix if it does split. A quarter teaspoon neutralizes some of the acid. It will foam. Add it before the cream if you know your tomatoes are very sharp.

Adding beans or sausage

Either turns this from a starter into a meal. Beans keep it vegetarian, sausage does not.

Beans. One 15 ounce can of cannellini or chickpeas, drained and rinsed, added for the last 10 minutes. Rinsing matters, since the canning liquid is starchy and salty and will cloud the soup. Cannellini break down slightly and thicken it, which is a bonus. This also lifts the protein from about 6 grams a serving to around 14.

Sausage. 12 ounces of Italian sausage, casings removed. Brown it first in the pot before the vegetables, breaking it into pieces, then lift it out and build the soup in the rendered fat. Return it with the stock so it has time to give its flavor to the pot. Cook ground sausage to 160F.

Both together works and is essentially minestrone at that point, which is no bad thing.

Small pasta is the third option. Half a cup of ditalini or small shells, added for the last 10 minutes. Same warning as always: it keeps absorbing liquid overnight, so cook it separately if you want leftovers.

Make ahead, storage, and reheating

Make ahead. Better the next day, like most tomato dishes. Nothing in the base version suffers from sitting.

Cool it properly. Do not leave the pot on the stove to cool. Divide it into shallow containers no more than a couple of inches deep and refrigerate within two hours. A large pot holds heat in the middle for hours, sitting in the 40F to 140F range where bacteria multiply fastest.

Refrigerating. 4 to 5 days, the longest of any soup here, because there is no meat or dairy in the base version.

Freezing. Freezes very well. Six months. This is the best freezer soup on the site and it is worth doubling for that reason. The creamy version is the exception and should be frozen before the cream goes in.

Reheating. Straightforward over low heat. Zucchini will be softer on day two, which cannot be helped.

A short history

Tomatoes are indigenous to western South America and were domesticated in Mesoamerica. They reached Europe in the sixteenth century through the Spanish, and were treated with deep suspicion for roughly two hundred years, largely because the plant belongs to the nightshade family and the leaves and stems genuinely are toxic. The fruit is not, but the association stuck.

Tomato soup as a common dish is much more recent than the tomato itself, and it is tied to canning. Commercial canning made ripe tomatoes available year round for the first time, and condensed tomato soup, introduced by Campbell in 1897, put it into essentially every American kitchen. The pairing with grilled cheese followed in the mid twentieth century.

The chunky vegetable version has a separate lineage, closer to Italian minestrone and to the general European tradition of soups built from whatever the garden gave you that week. That is still the best way to think about this recipe. The tomato base is fixed, and the vegetables are a suggestion.

Nutrition, estimated

Per serving, based on 4 servings.

These are estimates calculated from standard reference values for the listed quantities, not laboratory measurements. This is by far the lightest soup in the collection and the only one with no cholesterol at all. Almost all the sodium comes from the canned tomatoes and the stock, so no salt added and low sodium versions of both will cut that figure substantially. The 16 grams of sugar are the tomatoes and vegetables themselves, not added sugar. The figure does not include any salt added to taste.

References

• How Temperatures Affect Food, USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. The danger zone between 40F and 140F, why a large pot must be cooled in shallow containers rather than left on the stove, and safe reheating.
• Leftovers and Food Safety, USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. Safe storage times, the two hour rule, and reheating leftovers to 165F throughout.

Related guides

• The Five Mother Sauces, which covers sauce tomate, the long built version of a tomato base
• How to Butcher a Pig, for making your own sausage for the meat version
• The Butchery Guides, all 36 of them

Thank you

Thank you for cooking this. It is the least expensive thing on this site and it asks for nothing but a little patience with the tomato paste, which makes it, in some ways, the recipe I am most pleased when people try.

If you make it, I would like to hear how it went, and especially what you changed. This is a soup that invites changing. Tell me here.

If this one worked for you, the mother sauces guide covers sauce tomate, which is where this technique came from.

Cook Bolder, Serve Wiser, Eat Better.

Chef Alan, 35 years in professional kitchens and a six-time Four Diamond chef
Wine Drop Cookery