Roasted Tomato-garlic Soup Recipe

How to make it

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• Preheat roaster to 450 degrees, but remove the inner pan.
• Wash the tomatoes in warm soapy water (you'll be using the skins) and rinse.
• Slice the tomatoes lengthwise and put into the inner pan of the roaster. It's okay to go to 2 layers.
• Spoon bits of the chili paste all over the tomatoes.
• Peel apart the heads of garlic into cloves, then spread over the top of the tomatoes. Do not peel.
• Put this inner pan of tomatoes & garlic into the preheated roaster so it can begin cooking.
• Now peel the jicama or yucca, then cut into large chunks.
• Spray a sheet of foil with cooking spray, then put it on the roaster rack.
• After the tomatoes & garlic have roasted for 30 min, put the chunks of root veggie onto the foil, and the foil onto the rack, then put the rack into the roaster with the tomatoes.
• Roast another 45-60 min, but check the root veggie chunks after 30 min --- remove them as soon as they're fork-tender, and let the tomatoes & garlic keep roasting.
• I usually do all the roasting one day and the blending on another day. This lets everything cool down enough for the blender, and makes it easier to remove the garlic husks.
• Remove the garlic meat from the husks.
• In batches, blend the tomatoes & garlic with the tomato juice from the roasting pan, adding a bit of broth as needed to ensure it all gets pureed. Then add chunks of root veggie to get it to the thickness you like. You want it to be just thick enough to get the blender to puree it.
• Note: Yucca has a lot more starch than jicama, and you'll use half as much of it as you will for jicama. A mix of these two is also nice.
• Once you have all of the tomatoes & garlic pureed, with as much root veggie and broth as you needed to get it to your preferred consistency, begin adding the arbol and pequin chili powder and salt or Tony Chachere's (it has salt in it).
• You now have a soup "concentrate" that you can freeze in ziplock bags and to which you'll later add broth for a truly lovely comfort-food tomato soup. You could also add some Bulgarian buttermilk for a tangy-creamy addition, in case you put too much chili powder in it!