Genius Recipes
15-Minute Creamy (Vegan!) Tomato Soup + a Call for Your Best Beginner Cooking Tips
The Food Lab strikes again.
Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.
In this moment of renewal and return to normal kitchen life, I would like to give you a gift: a 15-minute, extremely cozy and smart tomato soup that will improve the lots of all of us. The weeknight speed demons, vegans, grilled cheese obsessives, parents of small children, solo diners, and, perhaps most of all, cooks who are just beginning. And I'm going to ask a favor in return: I want your favorite beginner recipes and tips. But we’ll get to that!
First: this simple, powerful, giving little soup.
Of all the clever things J. Kenji López-Alt has done in his career—the Food Lab cookbook and column at Serious Eats, the years clocked at America’s Test Kitchen and on restaurant lines—this 15-minute soup is one of his favorites, and the one he makes most often.**
Here’s how Kenji gets maximum mileage out of a few pantry staples in only 15 minutes:
First, he slices an onion very thinly and grates a couple cloves of garlic, so that they cook swiftly as soon as they land in hot oil, with a hit of dried oregano and dried chile flakes sizzling along with them. In other, mellower recipes, these aromatics would enter and build in layers so chunks of onion can soften without garlic burning, fresh herbs can keep their mojo. But here, they’re prepped and timed perfectly so you can get on with your soup, and your night.
Next is the one-two punch that allows him to conjure a creamy soup without any cream or butter: Punch 1) He adds a little sandwich bread in with the tomatoes to break down as he brings the soup up to a boil. Punch 2) Then, after a 5-minute simmer as a quick icebreaker for all the ingredients, he blends the soup while slowly streaming in olive oil. Much like in making gazpacho, the bread helps the oil latch on and emulsify into a lighter, thicker, creamier soup that softens all the spicy, acidic edges. Kenji says you could consider this hot gazpacho.
So there’s your perfect little soup recipe for the new year, featuring a few genius tricks you can use next time you want to smooth out a harsh-tasting soup or sauce or stew, or thicken a wan one, or get to onion-garlic-spice harmony super fast.
But before you run off to get your grilled-cheese station ready, I’d love to hear from you: What other recipes and unexpected tips have made the biggest difference for you, or for your kids, timid partners, or friends who are new to cooking but want desperately to feel less so? The beginner-friendly tricks that don’t take a lot of earned muscle memory in the kitchen, that will inspire and reward people who are new to cooking, and not punish them for misstepping or lacking exactly the right pan size or appliance or fancy ingredient in their pantry. Those tricks. I know you've got them!
Here’s why: I’m starting to work on Genius Cookbook #3, following on the heels of Genius Recipes and Genius Desserts. This new one is for beginners and skill-sharpeners, and I’m really hoping it can provide a different, more intuitive and visually inspiring companion for budding cooks than your average cooking manual. To pull this off, just like last time, I'm going to need your help. Here are a few questions to start you off:
1) What are the recipes that you think will change a beginning cook’s life? They can be general (fried rice) or specific (Roberto Santibañez’s Classic Guacamole).
2) What books or cooking teachers made the biggest impact on you when you were first learning to cook?
3) What are the rules that have made you feel more powerful and successful in the kitchen? I’m not looking for read the recipe first or mise en place, useful as they may be, since those are often the first things books say to do. I want the unexpected lessons you remember from an old Two Fat Ladies episode or Julie Sahni cookbook, or the ones you learned the hard way.
4) What are the oft-said rules you really don’t have to follow? For example: replace your spices every 6 months. Nope, not doing that. How about instead: know that spices lose their oomph over time, and replace them when it will matter for what you’re cooking (or use a little more in a pinch)?
5) Anything else you really, really want me to know?
Thank you, once again, for sharing your wisdom with all of us—I know you’ll have strong opinions. I can’t wait to hear them.
| 1/2 | cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided |
| 2 | cloves garlic, grated on a microplane grater |
| 1 | small onion, finely sliced (about 1 cup) |
| 1 | teaspoon dried oregano |
| 1/2 | teaspoon red pepper flakes |
| 2 | slices white bread, crusts removed, torn into rough 1/2-inch pieces |
| 2 | (28-ounce) cans whole peeled tomatoes packed in juice |
| Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper | |
| Minced chives, basil, or parsley as garnish | |
| Bread or grilled cheese for serving |
| 1/2 | cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided |
| 2 | cloves garlic, grated on a microplane grater |
| 1 | small onion, finely sliced (about 1 cup) |
| 1 | teaspoon dried oregano |
| 1/2 | teaspoon red pepper flakes |
| 2 | slices white bread, crusts removed, torn into rough 1/2-inch pieces |
| 2 | (28-ounce) cans whole peeled tomatoes packed in juice |
| Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper | |
| Minced chives, basil, or parsley as garnish | |
| Bread or grilled cheese for serving |
**In fact, as Kenji recently told me, "I literally just made that soup for [my daughter] Alicia last week when we got to our Airbnb after a nine-hour car ride with virtually no fresh ingredients stocked in the kitchen. I think I cut it down to about 7 minutes ;)"
Got a genius recipe to share—from a classic cookbook, an online source, or anywhere, really? Please send it my way (and tell me what's so smart about it) at [email protected]—thank you to magical writer and cook (and former Food52 editor) Caroline Lange for this one!
From our new podcast network, The Genius Recipe Tapes is lifelong Genius hunter Kristen Miglore’s 10-year-strong column in audio form, featuring all the uncut gems from the weekly column and video series. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss out.
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Written by: Kristen Miglore
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77 Comments
Added 1 small carrott, thinly sliced like the onion. Added this with the tomatoes but next time will try with the onions.
Also added half a tea spoon of baking soda after the soup boiled which takes the acidity of the tomatoes further. It bubbles a bit but than goes back to normal.
All in all this was a very creamy soup with no dairy, I am hooked!
Unless you really like margaritas or smoothies the average home cook doesn't need a full size blender.
Immersion blenders are faster to use, you don't have to transfer to another container, and much easier to clean.
Oh, and no, it didn't taste of tofu. Tofu always soaks up the flavor of the main dish you create.
All tofu comes packaged in water that will be smelly if the tofu is out of date.
Oh, and no, it didn't taste of tofu. Tofu always soaks up the flavor of the main dish you create.
Additionally, I am not nutty vegan scurrying around avoiding animal product ingredients.
I can add butter and cream with pride and no shame to get the real meaning of creamy, not pureed bread.
It makes me want to scream when I see recipes suggesting that you blacken peppers whole over an open flame, or broil them whole in the oven. There is nothing more irritating and time consuming than trying to peel, core and remove the seeds and pithy ribs from a now limp and cooked whole pepper. And don't even get me started on the idea of putting them into a paper bag to rest after cooking to make removing the skins easier. Talk about a way to lose all the flavourful juices and who has paper bags hanging around anyway?
I split, core and remove the ribs from my peppers first, and then flatten them with my hand before putting them on a baking sheet under the broiler. Not too close because you want the peppers to soften before the skins are blackened. Flattening the peppers ensures more even cooking and blackening of the skins.
When sufficiently blackened, I put them in a bowl or shallow baking dish to cool with a tea towel over the bowl to hold in the steam. Give them half an hour or so and they will be cool enough to handle and the skins will come off fairly easily. All the juices will have collected in the dish and can be added to whatever you are making with the roasted peppers.
This process works well - and you can do a quantity of peppers easily for freezing and using at a later date.
*Newly married in 1955, I turned on the TV and watched Dione Lucas tell me I don't have to sift flour -- modern flour no longer contains nasty little creatures. She also demonstrated how to flute a mushroom, a skill I don't use.
*My all-time favorite cookbook is What Cooks in Suburbia by Lila Perl, published in 1961 and out of print. Its recipes produce delicious meals from breakfast to desserts. Often a cookbook will yield a single recipe: Snert from a book by Molly O'Neill; Martha Stewart's tarter sauce, but I still cook half the recipes from Lila Perl's book.
*Modern meats, especially beef, take less time to cook. Recently I made Boeuf Bourguignon from Julia Child's Mastering book. It was done in half the time (my oven temperatures are accurate), in fact, a little overdone.
*I'm seeing a lot of slow cooker recipes. I refuse to buy this gadget. I like to monitor what I cook -- taste it, stir it, smell it -- Slow cooker recipes should include instructiions on how to adapt the recipe to a standard Dutch oven.
*Carbs are not my friends. My weight and well-being do better without them. The soup recipe looks interesting but I don't eat bread. My meals are a combination of Paleo/Keto. New cookbooks should consider this population--I'm not alone.
Slow cookers are for keeping food warm at work potlucks. lol
Expired baking powder will ruin a recipe - guess how I know??
What I mean to say is, check your ingredients for freshness. And don't be too hard on yourself: even the greatest cook will sometimes mess up a dish. That's just how it goes!
One thing that I learned over time is this: When cooking meat in oil in a skillet on your stove top, have a paper towel on a plate next to the stove so that you can drain the meat of excess oil after cooking. When I first started cooking many years ago, many recipes that I used mentioned browning meat in a skillet; I did this but never drained the meat after cooking it in oil, so when I added additional ingredients per the recipe there was always an excess of oil/fat at the top of whatever it was that I was cooking. I gradually came to realize that draining the cooked meat of its oil/fat was a step that was implied in the recipe, and that experienced cooks would do that as a matter of course -- it didn't need to be expressly written in the recipe. Perhaps this was a function of how old the recipe was, and how experienced the person writing the recipe was (I have a cookbook from the 1950s, and one of the oft-repeated directions in it is, "Cook in the usual way"). I find it useful that many recipes of recent vintage will tell you to drain your meat cooked in oil/fat on a paper towel before using the meat further in the recipe.
Tom Colicchio on Top Chef is always talking about dishes needing more acid. The first time I heard him say that, I went, "What? Acid?" That was one thing the cooking school missed in their education. That tip, adding acid, changed everything. Now i have lots of different flavored vinegars in my pantry and I match them to the flavors of the dish, plus using citrus, etc., according to what would taste good with the other ingredients.
Which leads me to Samin Nosrat's "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat"-it's a cooking course in a book. Her series on Netflix is excellent, too. She explains why chefs do things the way they do. Cook your way through it. I know you're looking for tips you can use it your book, but this one's so excllent it deserves a plug. And the main takeaway from her book goes back to what I learned in cooking school--taste. Taste. Taste. Taste everything you make at every stage of the process. Without tasting, you can't know if you've got the spices, seasonings, acids, flavors that you're looking for. If you watch cooking shows, that's the one thing every chef repeats like a broken record, if that old metaphor still makes sense.
Get a scale. Learn to weigh in grams, (if you're American and not used to the metric system) especially when baking. Your food, but particularly baked goods will turn out much better because weighed ingredients are more consistent. Ditto for testing your oven temperature with an oven thermometer so you can get the temperature right. I learned this baking advice goes double for low-carb/keto baking with nut flours.
My husband used to say that you can't make fresh food without taking some time and messing up some stuff. There are amazing simple dishes out there. But don't expect toss in the microwave speed leaving you with only one dish and a fork to clean if you're cooking fresh food. You'll get better and more efficient as you do it more, so have patience with the learning process.
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