Tomato Soup

I have been struggling to continue my project to find natural food colouring as in this post. I was probably focused to much in cakes, while food colouring is actually can be used in many type of food, like soups.

Last night was the second time I cooked tomato soup. I found the simplest and easiest recipe here and got idea of how to make the tomato soup looks naturally red. Unfortunately I forgot from which site was the idea came from. I will re-post again if I could find it.
Update: I found the site again! Here it is, give it a visit: homecooksrecipe.com

Wouldn't it wonderful if you can have good RED tomato soup? If we use canned tomato paste or sauce, you might will get that hot red colour. However, I want to cook as close as natural food, and canned tomato could probably has artificial food colouring, right?

So, here is the key; Beet Root. Just a slice of beet root, and everything is good. I used about the size of ice cream's scoop or maybe two tablespoon of beet.

I did used one tablespoon of tomato paste to follow the original recipe. One tablespoon did not really change the colour to red. Beet root does. You can use any tomato soup recipe and put a slice beet root to it make natural red.

By the way, I looooove this soup because it means I could continue the natural colouring project. Beet root officially a natural food colouring! I'll update the natural colouring post right now.

So, here is the recipe that I made.

Tomato Soup

Ingredients:
1kg ripe tomatoes
1 medium onion
1 small carrot
1 celery stick
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tablespoon of tomato purée
a slice of beet root
a good pinch of sugar
2 bay leaves
some ground black pepper (I use black and white pepper)
1.2 litres hot stock (I just made it from water and a piece of chicken :p)

Directions:
- Dice all of the vegetables including the onion.
- Heat up oil on the pan.
- Throw in the diced onion, carrot and celery stick. Stir until soften.
- Put in the tomato purée, stir well.
- Get the diced tomatoes in the pan, stir again.
- Season it with salt, sugar, black pepper and bay leaves.
- Let it cook for a while until the tomatoes a bit shrink.
- Pour in the stock, but save a bit to help blend the beet root in blender.
- Put the lid on and stir occasionally until they are soft and juicy.
- Take the lid off and fish out the bay leaves.
- I waited a little bit more to let the vegetables a bit cooler.
- Meanwhile, blend the beet root and a bit of stock until smooth.
- Pour in cooked tomato into blended beet root and blend altogether until smooth.
- Put it back to the pan and you can taste it and add more seasoning if necessary.