(Why is this article called First Tomato Soup? It’s a great children’s book that I’ve got a lot of feelings for.)
This week I attended and cooked for a talk about growing tomatoes, which are a gleam in a gardener’s eye right now. We won’t get our teeth into the real thing for unimaginable months. (July. Remember July?) What I learned, though, is that it’s totally time to be thinking about what to grow, should we grow.
I might not grow, but I will cook!
For the talk attendees, I made good old grilled cheese sandwiches and a tomato soup. I love painfully traditional dishes, as you can tell from last week’s roast chicken.
For the grilled cheese, choose the bread you like. I choose a white sourdough. Grilled cheese bread needs to be buttered inside and out, then filled with cheese, salted and grilled slowly in a pan so the cheese melts while the sandwich gets golden brown and crispy. This is law.
Right now, tomato soup is as out of season as it gets. Neither tomatoes nor basil are in season. So I faked it and dreamed of August.
For when we do get to August and it is truly time to make first tomato soup, it’s important to get the seeds out of tomatoes if you process them yourself. You can blanch the tomatoes to peel and deseed them: Cut an X in the tail end of the tomato and plunge it into boiling water until the skin starts to peel back. After cooling, the skins will slip off easily. (This can also be accomplished by simply freezing the tomatoes.)
Here’s how I did it in March, using canned San Marzano tomatoes and basil from who knows where.
How I did it: Tomato soup for 10
Ingredients
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
1½ cups yellow onions, finely chopped
5 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2x 28-ounce cans of crushed tomatoes (not puree, not whole, but crushed in juice)
2 cups stock
¼ cups chopped basil
1 tablespoon sugar
½ teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon salt (adjust to taste)
¾ cups heavy whipping cream
⅓ cup grated parm
Over medium heat, sauté the onions and garlic slowly in the butter until they are soft and translucent.
Add tomatoes with juice, stock, basil, sugar, pepper and salt and bring to a boil.
Turn down to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes.
Remove from heat and puree in a blender or with an immersion stick.
Be careful if you blend the soup while it is still hot. Do not fill the blender more than ⅔ full, and leave the lid venting a little bit to keep steam from building up. Similarly, if you use an immersion wand, start deep in the soup so as not to splash hot soup everywhere.
Return the blended soup to the stove, stir in the cream and cheese and bring back to a simmer.
Take the soup off the stove and enjoy with those grilled cheese sammies.
Which brings us to this week’s question!
From Maria’s couch, the question is: What is the best way to thicken a béchamel without gluten?
My daughter has celiac disease, so I have a fondness for this question.
The Internet says béchamel is a rich white sauce made with milk infused with herbs and other flavorings. It is one of the sauces that form the base for all kinds of dishes. For example, you could add cheddar to put over noodles for mac and cheese, or broccoli as a cheese sauce, or add Parm to make Alfredo, etc. It does not mention flour at all, which got me thinking.
I have three and a half ideas for how to make this rich, white sauce happen gluten free.
As a creature of habit, I like to use a pinch of nutmeg along with good old salt and pepper to season my white sauces. Especially for mac and cheese. So let’s assume that is what you are going to do in all of these circumstances.
I often make a béchamel using a “one to one” gluten-free flour mix from King Arthur, Bob’s Red Mill or the like, which replicates regular flour pretty well. Béchamel is a simple process of making a roux, which is cooking fat into flour and slowly adding dairy to make a thick sauce.
The measurements are pretty standard: 1 tablespoon flour, 1 tablespoon butter, 1 cup of milk, cream or a combo. I would use a common recipe, such as this one.
A couple of tips from experience: Go slow when cooking the flour into the butter. It is easy to burn these delicate mixes. And do not undercook the flour. Also, when I have tried to make a béchamel to use the next day, this flour is not stable the way glutinous flour is, and gets runny if allowed to sit overnight. So make it when you are going to use it.
My other two and a half ideas are not technically béchamel, but could be used as a base in the same way.
My first idea was to use potato and make a slightly runny mash to add flavor to. I would suggest using what is called a “starchy” potato, as compared to a “waxy” one. Starchy are the potatoes that bake the best, such as Idaho and russet – the ones with the oblong shape and the rough outer skin. Waxy potatoes are ones that boil and roast better, such as yellow or red bliss, or fingerlings.
While you could boil the potatoes, I think the way to preserve the most starch and make them thicken the best is going to be to roast them: Poke a few holes with a fork so they do not pop and put them right on the wire rack of your oven for about an hour at 350. As a test of their readiness, an inserted knife should slide out very easily. (This is also the way to make a “jacket” or baked potato, so maybe make an extra to enjoy with sour cream, butter and chives.)
Cut the potato open to let it cool, then scrape out the insides. Mix with a little bit of butter and more cream or milk than you would use to make basic mashed potatoes. I can imagine this being delicious as a sauce with fish.
The last suggestion I have is to use a thickener such as arrowroot or cornstarch. I’m calling this an idea and a half, because there are many options. In this case, I would make a slurry (thinner than a paste, but not as thin as a liquid) of the thickener with milk or cream – then add dairy slowly until you get to your desired thickness while warming the mix gently on the stove. The downside of these thickeners is that they have a sort of slippery mouth feel.
Hearty dishes with gluten-free béchamel are a good project to play with while waiting for fresh tomatoes and dreaming of first tomato soup.
Send cooking questions to JJ Gonson, a personal chef at Cuisine en Locale, at [email protected].