Chilled Sun Gold Tomato Soup with Lots of Summer Stuff

I picked up a container of sun gold tomatoes from the farmers market several weeks ago and “my dealer” said “those are very good right now”. I threw a second one into my bag without a hesitation. I popped one into my mouth when I got home and oh it was so good. I couldn’t stop eating them. I’ve been gorging on these little grape size beauties ever since.

This soup is simple yet delicious. It is as cooling as it is colorful. You might have guessed by now this is another recipe in Deep Run Roots by Vivian Howard.

I like the soup temperature to be on the room temperature side of chilled. The flavor isn’t as pronounced when it’s too cold. The garnish is delicious in its own right so eat it alone, in the soup, or on top of fish or chicken.

Soup Ingredients
2 Tbl olive oil
2 yellow onions, diced
2 tsp salt
8 cups Sun Gold cherry tomatoes
1 bay leaf (or 3-4)
¼ tsp chili flakes
water
4 garlic cloves, smashed
2/3 c buttermilk
¼ c heavy cream
1 Tbl sherry vinegar (optional)

Summer Garnish Ingredients
1 c of fresh corn (about 1 ear)
1 c of red tomatoes (or a contrast color from the ones in the soup)
1 c diced peaches or cantaloupe
1 c diced cucumber
2 Tbl of fresh herbs (mint, basil, tarragon, cilantro all work)
1 tbl lemon juice
2 Tbl olive oil
1 tsp salt (optional)

Directions
In a 4-6 quart heavy bottom pot, add 2 Tbl of oil and heat it until the oil glistens. Chop your onions (you can even slice it if you prefer). Add them to the pot and let them sweat. You should hear a little sizzle that quickly fades.

When the onions are clear, add the tomatoes (if your tomatoes are large, give them a rough chop and make sure you add the juice and seeds to the pot), salt, bay leaves, chili flakes, and water to cover the ingredients. Cover the pot and bring the liquid to a boil. Reduce it to a simmer and uncover the pot. Cook until the liquid reduces to half.

Remove the bay leaves, and add the garlic. Use an immersion blender to puree. You can pass the soup through a mesh strainer to catch the tomato peels – I usually skip this step unless I’m feeding humans who don’t live in my house.

Add the buttermilk and cream and stir. Taste. Add salt if needed. Add vinegar if you want to brighten the soup – there is a possibility it won’t be needed.

Cut the corn off of the cob. Rub the dull side of the knife against the cob to extract some corn milk. Put the corn and corn milk into a large bowl. Dice your tomatoes, peaches or cantaloup, and cucumber to roughly the same size as the corn kernels. Stack your herbs and roll them. Slice them thinly. Add them to the bowl.

Add lemon juice and olive oil to the corn mixture. Let the flavors marry for about 15 minutes. Taste. Add salt if you like. If you aren’t eating it during the next few minutes, don’t salt until ready to serve.

Spoon your soup into a bowl and add a generous amount of the garnish.

Notes
Get the tastiest tomatoes you can find. It’ll make a difference here.

If you’re using large tomatoes, cut an x on the bottom of the tomato. Dunk it in boiling water for a few seconds then peel. This will let you skip the step of running it through the strainer.

I recently forgot to stir in the buttermilk #distractions until after the soup was divvied up into individual servings and was already garnished. We drizzled the buttermilk on top in a somewhat circular pattern. It was beautiful.

Corn sugar begins to turn to starch almost immediately after it’s picked. If the corn looks sad (old), use frozen corn.