Homemade Tomato Soup

Oh....this is SO GOOD!

Tammy's Recipes is one of my new favorite food blogs to visit. I found her after being linked to her wheat bread recipe, which I have made a few times now, but haven't posted it yet. I started checking out her canning recipes & found her recipes for Homemade Tomato Soup . We've been growing tons & tons of tomatoes for so many years, I can NOT believe I never once thought of making homemade tomato soup, much less canning it! Tammy's recipe is for a big batch which makes about 10 quarts for canning. She also gives directions for a smaller batch. I did this first in order to make sure that we liked it. Oh, we LOVED it!

In the above small batch, this is how I made it.

Simmer 2 quarts of home canned tomato juice. ( Or cook down tomatoes & run it through a colonder or food mill to make approx. 2 quarts of juice.)

Add seasonings to taste. I added 1 t. onion powder & 3/4 t. celery salt. My tomato juice was already salted so I didn't add regular salt. I also added some pepper & a bit of garlic powder.

In a seperate pan, melt 6 T. butter. Stir into that 6 T. flour. Then add a few cups of the simmering tomato juice to the butter/flour mixture. I guess you'd call this a tomato roux! LOL

Stir until it thickens & then add it all into the tomato juice that is simmering.

When this was ready to serve, I did add 2 cups of half & half.

Stir. Eat. Enjoy!

It was really excellent. I will not be buying canned tomato soup again!

So, the following weekend after making this soup, we had our FOURTH big pickin' from our tomato plants. We thought surely we wouldn't get as much as we had been getting. Plus, they aren't in the best of shape now. They are smaller & have more spots to cut out now. I was shocked that we had 13 or 15 bags (I can't remember now). I figured I should weigh them since I was going to be converting a recipe that called for 1/2 bushel, or approx. 26 pounds of tomatoes. Also, I was planning on making her pizza sauce or seasoned tomato sauce that day too. I weighed each bag, & the grand total was 128.5 pounds of tomatoes! No, I am not kidding!

Long story short...I finished canning that night at 4:40a.m.

Here's the result:

26 quarts of Homemade Tomato Soup & 14 pints of pizza sauce!

I did do one thing differently in the big batch. I added 1 whole stalk of celery (with leaves) & about 5 onions to the tomatoes as they cooked. Once it was juice I did still season with some more celery salt & onion powder, just not as much.
Thank you Tammy, for giving me something else to can with these tomatoes!

This soup is delicious! And so is the pizza sauce, but I'll post about that another day.