Cream of tomato soup at home: an easy recipe for winter

On a winter evening, or for a light dinner, cream of tomato soup is an easy way to have something warm. The tangy-sweet taste of fresh tomatoes, softened with cream, comes together in a short time from ordinary kitchen ingredients. On 20 December 2025 the lifestyle desk of the Bangladeshi news site Jagonews24 published a recipe for the soup; its ingredients and steps are set out below.

Tomato soup is a soup with tomatoes as its main ingredient. It can be smooth, or made with chunks of tomato, cream, chicken or vegetable stock and other vegetables. According to encyclopedic references, the first published recipe for tomato soup appeared in 1832. The tomato itself (Solanum lycopersicum) originated in western South America and belongs to the nightshade family, alongside the potato and chilli peppers.

In Bangladesh the tomato is mainly a winter, or Rabi season, vegetable. The Digital Herbarium of Crop Plants, an online catalogue kept by the Department of Crop Botany at the agricultural university in Gazipur, lists 40 tomato varieties developed by the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) and the Bangladesh Institute of Nuclear Agriculture (BINA); their growing season is given mainly as Rabi, with some hybrids for the summer or Kharif season. For soup, fully ripe fruit is the one to choose, since ripeness gives the flavour its depth.

• 5 large red tomatoes, chopped
• 1 tablespoon chopped onion
• 1 teaspoon chopped garlic
• 1 teaspoon chopped ginger
• 1 cup chopped carrot
• 5 black peppercorns
• 4 cups stock (or water)
• 2 tablespoons butter (or oil)
• 1 tablespoon cornflour
• 1 tin of cream
• Sugar to taste
• Salt to taste
• 5 pieces of fried bread to garnish

• Heat the butter or oil in a pan and fry the onion, garlic, ginger and carrot until lightly softened.
• Add the chopped tomatoes and cook for 5 to 7 minutes, until they are completely soft.
• Blend the softened tomato mixture.
• Pour the blended tomatoes back into the pan, heat, and stir in the salt, sugar and pepper.
• Add the stock or water and let it boil for 10 to 15 minutes.
• Turn off the heat and blend the mixture once more into a smooth paste.
• Pour the paste into a separate pan, heat it and add the cream or cornflour.
• When the soup comes to the boil, take it off the heat and serve hot, topped with fried bread or a spoonful of cream.

The tomato's red colour comes from a pigment called lycopene. In a study led by Cornell University food scientist Rui Hai Liu and published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry in 2002, heating tomatoes to 88 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes raised their trans-lycopene content by 164 percent, while vitamin C fell by 29 percent over the same time. Cooking, in other words, takes away some nutrients and makes others easier for the body to use.

Many health claims are made for lycopene, but in 2011 the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) found insufficient evidence that it has antioxidant effects in humans. Cream and butter add fat, so anyone on a restricted diet or with a health condition should ask a doctor about what suits them.

Photo: Regan 76 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Sources: Jagonews24, Cornell University (Cornell Chronicle, April 2002), Digital Herbarium of Crop Plants (Department of Crop Botany, Gazipur), Wikipedia (Tomato, Tomato soup)