Tomato Soup with Purple Basil… and a Love Affair

I have a crush on the girl from Stokes Farm. Really, she’s a woman, but in my head (like **The Secret Egg Guy**) she’s **The Girl From Stokes Farm**. I have a crush on her tomatoes, her garlic, her eggplants and her seedlings, but I have a crush on her, too.

She teases me every August with her breathtaking dark black brandywines, her saucy federles and her sexy, racing-striped green zebras. No matter what happens, I keep coming back for more.

This Summer I will have to do without her, having only just glimpsed her wares before they were really in swing. The Agent may get to enjoy her smiling gaze, without me, and I must pine.

(The Stokes Farmstand is at the Northeast corner of the Saturday Greenmarket at Union Square. The **Girl from Stokes Farm** is a curly-haired redhead with an enormous smile, but I don’t know her name.)

Tomato Soup with Purple Basil
A note about the photo: I hate that tablecloth. I hate it because it’s ugly, and because it makes the soup look weird. I doctored up the contrast a little bit, but I’m no expert. -JF

Tomato Soup with Purple Basil
Serves 6-8

The recipe¹ that follows is in progress, and is easily adjustable and addable and subtractable.

1 cup chopped onion, about 1 medium
2 tbsn extra-virgin olive oil
2 tbsn butter
1 small serrano chile, minced (I remove the white ribs, more on that later)
2-1/4 to 1-1/2 lbs ripe tomatoes, almost any variety, chopped. Sauce varieties (roma, federle) will make a thicker soup and, well, taste more like sauce (this isn’t necessarily a bad thing)
Salt and freshly ground black AND white pepper
up to 1 tbsn sugar, optional
1 handful purple basil leaves, torn (about 1/2 cup)
1 cup (or more) vegetable or chicken stock
6 splashes champagne vinegar, optional
6 tbsn or more sour cream, optional

Saute the onion in butter and oil over medium-low heat until translucent, stirring as needed. Do not brown. Season with salt and pepper. Add serrano chile and saute until fragrant (careful, it will wrinkle your nose, and possibly irritate it, also your eyes). Add tomatoes, juice, seeds, the whole schmear. Add salt and pepper to taste, and if the tomatoes are very acidic, add a small amount of sugar, if needed². Add the basil and stir well, add 1 cup vegetable stock and stir again.

Partially cover and adjust temperature so that tomatoes perk slowly. Simmer over low heat, stirring regularly, for 20-25 minutes, until tomatoes are more or less liquid. This might be an ideal moment to use the immersion blender (hint hint), but since I don’t have one, I can’t tell for for certain. What I can say is that a food mill with a medium blade did the perfect job, leaving in a reasonable amount of seeds, which I like. If you used the finest blade, the texture would be slightly lighter, but all the seeds would be eradicated.

Adjust the thickness of the soup with more vegetable stock, if needed, and simmer soup for a minute or two. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Serve in hot bowls with a splash of champagne vinegar stirred in at the last moment and a dollop of sour cream, if desired (but why the hell wouldn’t you desire either?).

As Jacques Pepin used to say, Happy cook-EENG!

¹ As a rule, I will only post a recipe in formal recipe format if it meets one of the following two criteria: 1) it is in the testing stages, meaning measurements and cooking times can be reasonably believed, and then it will be marked as “in progress” or 2) if it is fully tested, and recipe-following-ready.

² Use it sparingly: sugar with tomatoes is one of those voodoo things that’s difficult to explain. If you just add it at the end, it doesn’t do much, but when you put it in the beginning, it reaches caramel temperatures, and although it doesn’t “caramelize” in the traditional sense, it cooks in a way you might not expect. At any rate, if you like tomatoes, it’s better to err on the acidic side; the sour cream will go a long way in your absolution.