If you’re lucky you may have a glut of tomatoes – more than you can eat in salads alone.
This recipe works best with the bigger tomatoes (we grew “Ailsa Craig”) and who doesn’t like a smokey, creamy tomato soup?
Serves two
- 16 large tomatoes
- 2 red onions
- 6 fat garlic cloves
- olive oil
- 1 tbsp brown sugar
- sea salt
- black pepper
- 3 large basil leaves
- 300ml vegetable stock
- 3 tbsp double cream
Heat oven to 220C, gas mark 7. Cut the tomatoes in half through their middles and put cut side down in a large roasting tin. Halve the red onions but leave some of the papery skin on. Trim the tough base from the garlic cloves but leave their papery skins on too and add them with the onion to the tin. Drizzle well with the oil, add the sugar, a good pinch of salt and pepper.
Cook for 40 minutes. You’ll be surprised by the amount of juice that comes out. Shake the tray every now and then to stop the tomatoes at the edges burning. Rip up the basil leaves and add to the tin. Cook for a further 10 to 20 minutes.
Remove from the oven when most of the liquid has evaporated and what’s left is a little sticky. Pinch the dried skins off the onion and squash the garlic out of the end of the cloves. Discard the skins.
Zap everything in a liquidiser then pass through a sieve. It should be the consistency of ketchup. Put in a saucepan and add enough of the stock to thin it to your taste. Add the cream and serve.