why good soup ALWAYS tastes better at restaurants 🍅 tomato soup

Why good soup is always better at restaurants. Creamy, luxurious tomato soup. In this one, I'm busting out my old recipe book to show you a soup that we actually sold for Starbucks corporate here in Seattle. And I also wanna bring back good soup. So good soup is back and I'm gonna talk about why it's better at restaurants. How do you get a creamy, luxurious soup? This little nub right here, what do you do with it? This is still a lot of onion left and you can still get so much out of it. Now in this case, it doesn't really matter because I'm gonna blend everything. So I could just like cut it into chunks and it's gonna get blended. But in this case, I'll just show you. It's the same method. This is gonna go face down just like this. And then clearly we've got some more diced onion. And I'm left with this little onion nipple that I can toss or put into my stock, whatever. This also gets some garlic cloves. And now this brings me on to the next thing I wanna talk about with this. Now, this is a recipe that we used to make to sell to Starbucks. Yes, this exact soup, this exact soup was sold at Starbucks corporate because I'm in Seattle and the restaurants that I worked at, we sold it to them and it was a whole thing. Anyways, when it comes to recipes, those are like guidelines, right? I can look at all of this stuff right here and basically know what to do. What I'm trying to say here is I want you to be able to look at this stuff and realize it's very straightforward. Typically when you see this stuff with this stuff and this stuff, you would know, like this needs to be sweated with this. The spices needs to go in with what's being sweated. And then we add in a paste, cook that off, deglaze that with a liquid and then toss in the meat, which in this case is the tomato. I'm sorry if I'm not explaining it too well, but I think you'll get it as we go along with this soup series, that it's all very standard and the same when it comes to making things like this. Now, why do we blend butter with oil? And the reason being is the oil is going to help raise the smoke point of my butter. See, the butter has all that delicious flavor, but it can burn by the time I'm ready to get my onions in there and start sauteing them. So I want that flavor of the butter, but I also want a higher smoke point. And this blend is gonna help to do that. Now, why do I toss the spices in with the fat and the onions and the garlic? Why can't I just toss my spices straight into the soup when it's already made? Now, that is something very common that I see is people just tossing spices in whatever, whenever. You wanna toss them in at the right moment. See, spices love to be reconstituted, reheated, to get that dispersion of flavor. We're tossing it in with fat. Fat, fat absorbs flavor really well. That's probably why for, say, edibles, you would infuse the weed with the butter or whatever. That's a whole other thing. But anyways, I don't even know why I was going on that topic, I don't even smoke. Yeah, so you wanna toss the spices in at the right time so they can release all their flavor with the fat and disperse evenly throughout the dish. Tomato paste. You might think of this as cheating, but adding in tomato paste with any dish, you wanna cook it before you deglaze. And when I say deglaze, what I mean is before I add the liquid. So what I'm doing here is I'm adding it in right before I add in my tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes, before I add in the tomatoes, because the tomatoes have liquid. And I won't be able to get this caramelization if I put the paste in after. So the reason why I put the paste in before is because it's gonna caramelize, it's gonna get a deeper, darker, browner development, and it's gonna have more flavor. Caramelization of the sugars is gonna have a deeper flavor. Sorry if I'm not explaining it too well, but I'm trying, I'm trying my best here, okay? The tomatoes. Here's the thing. When it comes to a lot of things in restaurants, you gotta think of the amount that you're making, right? We're not gonna always have fresh tomatoes. And here's another thing. Fresh tomatoes, this is probably a hot take, hot opinion, but I think fresh tomatoes aren't as good for making a tomato soup. These guys have already been cooked and broken down, and that's gonna be a deeper flavor for our soup. We want it to be cooked and broken down. We don't want a fresh tomato. And this also is a San Marzano tomato. They're much sweeter, less acidic. They're actually grown in a specific region. I do recommend using San Marzano tomatoes for your tomato soup. They've got a nice flavor. But yeah, just like I'm saying is when you do have tomatoes in season, when they're nice, ripe, and sweet, sure, go for it, make the soup. Make something tasty with them. They're delicious that time of season. But if you want year-round consistency, and you want something that's already ready to go, broken down for your soup, canned tomatoes are perfectly fine and also I love just getting the whole peeled guys rather than the crushed ones. I don't know, it's a preference thing maybe, but the whole peeled guys is what I go with. Now, whatever liquid you decide to put into your soup, whether it's water, stock, whatever, always just put it back into the can. Let's get all of that tomato out, right? Just try to put it all in the can. Anything we can do to squeeze out all that extra flavor and also all of that money. I like to call these things money savers. Now, I wanna know if you've noticed something. You might notice that I haven't seasoned it yet. I haven't put any salt and here's the reason. This is gonna get blended. So if I were to season it right now, it's not gonna taste the same. Because it's gonna get blended, it's gonna be a different consistency. So when I season it, it's gonna be different. So I'm gonna wait till it's fully blended up and then I'm gonna season it. That's another thing when working with things that are getting pureed like this, always wait till you fully puree it before you season it. Now, do you remember how we were talking about fat and absorbing flavor? Same thing goes for these brown butter croutons. I'm not just going to brown butter. I'm also going to infuse it with herbage. And this is something I've talked about when I'm frying chicken, infusing my oils with herbage and garlic and stuff like that. Do the same thing when you're making croutons. Why not? You're already browning the butter, taking that time. So same thing for this instance. This is something that I used to do almost every day when I worked on the pantry station. I would brown like pots of butter with all of the herbs and the garlic and then just soak these giant croutons in it in the oven. And this is just coming down to what I was saying before, infusing the flavor in the fat first. Now, also when it comes to absorbing flavor, the bread is basically a sponge. So I like to squeeze it and absorb all of that flavor, all that fat. This is, like I said, something I did every day with our croutons. The croutons were about this size, not this small. So I thought I'd do a little play on it with these giant size croutons for our soup. Now, why are soups so much more silky smooth at restaurants? Now, one thing would be to simmer this on low and let it go low and slow. So it breaks down and it's nice and smooth after that. The next thing is a high-powered blender. You have to have a high-powered blender to get that silky smoothness. You can't really get the same thing unless you have like maybe a food mill and then a couple of like fine mesh strainers, and it's gonna take a lot more time. A high-powered blender is gonna get you the best results in my opinion. I mean, it just goes to show, I even did a video recently at a friend's house and you might've seen it where he didn't have a high-powered blender and it wasn't like as smooth as it could be. It still gets the job done, but you'll notice the difference with different blenders like these. Another thing is also blending your stuff for a long enough time. You gotta let it go for longer than you would think. This is something that my old chef, Nate, taught me. You wanna blend it for longer than you would think you would have to. That's gonna make all of the difference. This right here, I'll probably let it blend for five minutes. You might think that's crazy long, but no, it's true. It's gonna make it silky smooth. That comes down to the power of your blender as well. If your blender is not as powerful as this Breville one, then you might have to blend it even longer. Silky smooth. Beautiful. I'm gonna share a little tip. Now I'm gonna season it, right? But I wanna taste it before, obviously. In a restaurant setting, here's the thing. You don't wanna go through so many dishes and spoons and stuff. You might not wanna do that at home either. Also, if you're just cooking for yourself, you might not even care about this step. But if you are cooking for other people, let's not try to lick our spoon and put it back in the soup. So what I would do is take a coffee cup or some sort of cup or vessel. You put the spoon in the soup, put this in the vessel, and then you take a sip. And then from there, I can season accordingly. So now if I think I need to add maybe some more MSG or if I need to add some more salt, I can do that without having to worry about dirtying up my soup with my germs. This is if you're cooking for other people, like I said. It doesn't really matter if you're doing it for yourself. It's your own germs, whatever. All right, let's see. That is so good. I just did a video on what makes the best grilled cheese ever and why they're better at restaurants if you wanna check that out on the channel as well. Now, this is a very dumb, funny way of me doing it, but if you could get your plate even a little warm before putting the hot food in it, that makes all the difference. Cold plate will cool that food down faster, and you don't want that. You want your hot food to be hot when it's served. Just a little bit of extra virgin olive oil to finish with some fresh cracked black pepper. Tomato soup. Let me know what you wanna see next for good soup because good soup is back.