I love fall. It’s sweater season. It’s casserole season. It’s soup season. I particularly love that it’s soup season because a big pot of soup goes a long way. There’s something so relaxing about pulling out my Dutch oven and spending time in the kitchen making a soup like my family’s favorite minestrone. I put on some danceable music, and I get to work chopping vegetables, measuring seasonings, opening cans of beans, and the other usual, comforting tasks that come along with making the first soups of the season.
It seems that Jennifer Garner also loves to make soup in the fall. She shared with our sister brand EatingWell that she makes a couple of Ina Garten’s soup recipes that she’s crazy about. No surprise there. I have yet to meet an Ina Garten recipe that I haven’t loved. However, I’ve never made either of Ina’s tomato soups that Garner recommended.
“I love a couple of her tomato soups that I make in the fall,” Garner noted. She mentioned that she makes both the Roasted Tomato Soup from “The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook” and the Easy Tomato Soup & Grilled Cheese Croutons from “Modern Comfort Food.”
Grilled cheese croutons? I’m in. This is one I’ll be making on repeat.
Choosing Ingredients for Ina’s Easy Tomato Soup
Most of us know that Ina often tells her viewers to use “good” ingredients that are “the best” that you can find. She’s not being snooty with that advice. Good ingredients mean better flavor. For the soup portion of this recipe, Ina calls for good olive oil, chopped onion, minced garlic, chicken stock (preferably homemade), canned crushed tomatoes (preferably San Marzano), saffron threads, salt and pepper, orzo, and heavy cream.
When you have just eight ingredients, the taste of each really does matter. But, I’ll tell you a secret. To keep the cost of making this recipe down, I chose to balance “the best I could find” with “what just happened to be in the kitchen.”
Since this is a tomato-centered soup, I went with the real-deal Italian San Marzanos that come from a certain part of Southern Italy where strict growing and processing regulations create a rich, full flavor that many other canned tomatoes don’t. I pulled out some frozen stock and defrosted it, and I used saffron that I purchased in small quantities from a reputable spice shop.
But, I used regular store-brand olive oil, jarred minced garlic, store-brand heavy cream, and orzo from an already opened box that was originally opened many months ago.
For the grilled cheese croutons, I completely ignored Ina’s choices of country white bread and Gruyère cheese and instead grilled up American cheese on white sandwich bread, just to keep the cost down on a weeknight meal.
How Good Is Ina Garten’s Easy Tomato Soup?
After one bite, I realized why this is one of Garner’s favorite soups. It’s delicious. It tastes fresh even though it’s made with canned tomatoes. I’ve never used saffron in tomato soup before, but it added that subtle, hard-to-describe earthy, floral, slightly honey-sweet flavor that saffron brings. The orzo adds a lot of body to the soup, but I think when I make it next time, I’ll omit it, so I can have a plain tomato soup that I can freeze in batches. When I want to defrost and eat some of the soup, I can choose to add the orzo or not.
The only other change I’d make is to start with less salt than Ina calls for. The recipe calls for a tablespoon, and it was saltier than I would have liked. Next time, I’ll start with half the amount and add more at the end if needed.
All in all, this is definitely a soup I’d make again, tweaking a few things here and there, and I’m sure Ina (and Jennifer) would be okay with that.
