Not all tomatoes are created equal. This is something that is important to understand when cooking with them. Whether you are using fresh or canned tomatoes you must be sure that they are not going to cause your dish to have any off flavours. I have had a fantastic recipe fail because I used bad tomatoes and I feel that I must address this issue before posting any tomato based recipes.

Most of my life I lived in and around New Jersey. This area, many are aware, is known for fantastic tomatoes. When in season, they are some of the best you can get, and when out of season, I had some really fantastic canned tomatoes I always used. Then, just a few years ago, I moved to Canada and found out the hard way that you can’t take great tomatoes for granted. Just a few weeks after moving here I tried to make tomato sauce using my family recipe that has never ever ever failed. This time, however, it failed. The local fresh tomatoes in my new area are almost all pale and hard, with no flavour, and most of the canned varieties are bitter. I unwittingly used some canned tomatoes from the local grocery store and the sauce I made that day tasted like stomach acid.

I have a few cans of tuttorosso left over from a visit from my sister when she brought me a box of them. Yes, we love them that much. To the right is a can of the best tomatoes I could find in this area. The can doesn’t look like much but the tomatoes within are pretty decent. I have not done a side by side taste test yet, but I’m sure the tuttorosso would win.

I tried every brand of tomatoes that I could find in the area and pretty much all of them were sour, bitter, or just lame. I started reading forums and foodie blogs of people who live in my area to see what they use. I started hearing things about DOP San Marzano Tomatoes. These tomatoes are shipped straight from San Marzano Italy where it is said that the BEST tomatoes are grown. These are, presumably the only tomatoes that “real” Italian chefs will use for their sauce. “Be sure to find DOP on the label!” I was told, to be sure I was getting the real deal ( DOP is the seal of authenticity for real San Marzano tomatoes). I found out where to find them, little mom and pop specialty Italian shops would carry them. I was getting excited. “Not only”, I thought, “will I have tomatoes again, but surely they will be BETTER than anything I’ve ever had!” I went out to a few shops and bought a can of every DOP certified San Marzano brand I could find. After tasting each one individually I was horrified to discover that they all tasted just about as bitter as all the other brands I’ve found. Now to be fair, I never found Cento, which seems to be the brand everyone swears by. Just look up sauce recipes and you’ll see it all over the place. So I can’t speak for that brand in particular but I can say that DOP San Marzano tomatoes are NOT necessarily better than any other brand. I almost gave up completely until one day I tried a type I hadn’t tried before. It was a very cheap looking generic can of tomatoes. I expected them to be bitter like all the others and just planned to mask it with sugar. To my astonishment however, they actually tasted good! The only problem with this variety is that they have a lot of seeds so I always sieve out the seeds before using the tomatoes in a recipe. Tuttorosso, (the brand I used to love when I lived in the USA) didn’t have this problem.

A couple days ago I was preparing bread dough and thinking that it would be nice to make grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner with the finished bread. My next thought naturally went to tomato soup. I had a few cans of the ever so classic Campbell’s tomato soup in my cupboard. Dinner was planned. However, I then remembered that I have been toying with the idea of making tomato soup from scratch. I also remembered that I had recently bought a cart full (slight exaggeration) of good quality canned tomatoes. So then I was on a mission. I left the bread dough to rest and began to scour the internet for tomato soup recipes.

I found tons of interesting recipes but none were quite what I was looking for. Gourmet creamy tomato soups with puff pastries and recipes that included a long list of various vegetables like carrots, celery, bell peppers, and more. Also, recipes using strange or obviously overpowering herbs and spices were everywhere. The worst was one that used red food colouring to make the soup red because there were so many other veggies in it that it lost its redness. This just would not do! If a tomato soup is not red simply because of the tomatoes in it then something is horribly wrong! Some recipes looked delicious and some looked horrible but none were what I wanted. I wanted a simple tomato soup recipe that would result in a Campbell’s-like tomato soup, but… better, because it was homemade. Once a basic recipe was discovered it could then be built upon to make any fancy version one wishes. Add cream, add a pastry top, and add other flavourings as you desire, but the basic recipe MUST stand on its own. Also, as there are many recipes that call for canned tomato soup as an ingredient, I want to have the option to go the extra mile and make that ingredient from scratch from time to time. After my disappointing search I went back to the bread dough to finish kneading it and to think.

I ended up taking aspects of some of the recipes I found and added in a couple of my own ideas and developed a recipe. I set the dough aside for its first rise and got to work on my tomato soup experiment. I decided to take an approach similar to making tomato sauce and do a long simmer in order to develop a rich tomato flavour, so since the bread would take about 2 or 3 hours from this point I figured the timing should work out. So I did the first few steps in my little recipe and set it to simmer while the bread dough rose.

Fast forward to the moment of truth. The bread was finished and oh so spectacular, as always, and I was preparing the grilled cheese sandwiches. I had been tasting the soup as it cooked and I was pretty happy with it throughout the process, not wowed, but there’s no way of telling how it will actually taste when its all done, until, well until it’s done. So I gave it its final taste test, and WOW! It’s exactly what I was looking for. I did not expect the experiment to be so successful but I’m really really happy with it. It’s smooth and rich with deep tomato flavour, and it has that special Je ne sais quoi, that you crave when thinking about tomato soup. It takes a lot longer, but if you have time, it’s worth it for the flavour. My top food critic, my husband, had this to say, “Sure, I had to wait three hours for grilled cheese and tomato soup, but it was the best I ever had!” In the future I will cook it down to make condensed soup and use this as specified in recipes that call for canned soup. I will probably make big batches of it and freeze for convenience.

Just look at that spread of pure food delight. Three hours work well worth it. There is something so satisfying about freshly baked bread sitting on a rack to cool. I made two sandwich loafs and four giant hamburger buns…(big plans for those). I’ll post my bread recipes soon. The star of the show for now, however is the tomato soup. I will make it again soon and when I do I will document each step and post the recipe. Stay tuned! (my recipe for tomato soup here)