 Today's recipe we're making homemade tomato basil soup and I'm going to show you the best canned tomatoes to use for the very best flavor. I think even better than just using fresh because you've got to do a lot of extra steps if you're using fresh and we're going to make it simple for you. And I'm also making this dairy-free by using coconut milk but you could also use dairy if you prefer that. I'm Rock and Robin and I'm going to show you how to make it right after this. Alright I'm going to start off here with my chef joke. This is chef joke number one. Number two will be just a little bit later. So here we go. What type of tomato smells the best? Aroma! So here are the canned tomatoes that you really should try and use. See if you can find these. They cost a little bit more, at least these do. These are San Marzano tomatoes okay. They're a little bit more expensive. Like I said they come from Italy they are just Primo. They are just delicious and the way they grow them you can read about it on the back of the label. Anyway that's the first one. The second can is we're using some fire roasted tomatoes. It doesn't matter if they're whole or they're you know diced or whatever but you want to use those. The fire roasted gives them extra flavor like you've just roasted yours in the oven. So you want to use both of those. So we're going to start off with our tomatoes. We're going to place them into our blender and turn out to splatter. I wore a black shirt today for that reason. Now we just want to blend this up. You might like your tomato soup chunky a little bit on the chunky side right or you might want it really smooth. So just blend it up the way you'd like it. So I'm going to start with this. I like mine real smooth so you're going to see here how creamy and smooth that is. Now for the second can we'll pour in our second can. Okay so to that I'm going to place one bay leaf into the tomato sauce. I'm going to place that on the stove. I'm not even going to turn it on yet because we got some other things to do. So now that we have our tomatoes in the pan all nice and smooth now we're going to work on the flavor that goes into our soup and we're going to do that right over here in this frying pan. Okay so for our flavor we're going to take some olive oil, place it in our frying pan here over. I'm starting out at medium heat and I'm putting maybe a tablespoon maybe two tablespoons of olive oil in there and we're going to work on creating a flavor with what is called a mirepoix which is onion celery and carrots. That's a French term that means flavor base and you should use this for you know most soups not every soup but for a lot of soups and different sauces. So we'll place my chopped up I have some just one yellow onion, place that in the pan there and along with some carrots and some celery and we're going to cook this for you know about five six minutes or so. Alright so while we're waiting for our mirepoix to soften up and cook down and add lots of flavor for our soup we have time for chef joke number two. Here we go a man tried to start a fight by throwing dough, shredded cheese and tomato sauce at me so I said you want a pizza me? Did you get that one? Add a little bit of salt to this while these are cooking so here we go. Just a little bit of flavor layer. The mirepoix is probably going to take closer to ten minutes and that's because my carrots are a little bit bigger thicker than the onions and the celery and we want to get those carrots done because what we're going to do next is put this into our blender and blend it smooth with some chicken broth. So depending on how thick you know your carrots are you're going to have to go a little longer on your cooking which just brings out more flavor so don't be afraid of that you know we're going to go probably ten eleven minutes here on this just to get them soft. Alright when you think your carrots are soft take your fork and go ahead and poke one. Oh yeah nice and soft and tender that way it'll blend up nicely. Time to add our garlic I have about six cloves of garlic yeah lots of garlic here I love garlic and I tell you we're going to just mellow out the flavor by cooking this for about one no more than two minutes just move it around on the heat and that's another flavor booster let me tell you and that should do it for the garlic turn off the heat let this sit and cool for five minutes because it's going in the blender and we don't want it to be too hot. While the mirepoix is cooling I'm going to take some basil remember this is a tomato basil recipe and I have a nice stack here my stuff is getting a little wilty but that's okay it's still good even though I'm going to put in the blender I'm going to help it out a bit I'm going to roll it up and just slice it up you can get all the ingredients down below in the description of this video so be sure and click down there and you will find it all right time to get this into the blender carefully of course then I'm going to add some chicken broth here and the basil and some dried thyme and we'll just blend that up make sure that you're careful because it still could be hot there goes our mirepoix mixture quite thick as you can see and I still have a little more chicken broth to add to this because it is pretty thick and you can always add more if you need to to thin it down and we're going to let this simmer for you know 10 15 minutes or so remember to remove however this remember our bay leaf want to take that out eventually we're going to let that simmer in there for a little bit longer now it's time to add the coconut milk I'm using full fat here now if you decide to use dairy that's that's fine you can use heavy cream you can use you know half and half whatever you want just remember that the higher the fat content the creamier your soup will be now the next thing we need to add and don't be surprised about this is some sugar now we need the sugar to balance out the acid okay otherwise it's just going to be it's going to be too acidic so I've got some coconut sugar here that I'm adding to this which is about a tablespoon and you can use anywhere from one one to two tablespoons I think should cut it and you can use other sweeteners if you want that's all the ingredients to go into this now we're going to taste it and adjust our seasonings we might need to add more salt or you know even more basil or more sugar whatever you want I think it needs a little bit more salt and that should do it our soup is done doesn't it look delicious I tell you it just looks incredible nice and hot serve it up here in my bowl and I happen to have a little basil plant here that I got from a friend and I'm just going to pick off a leaf or two and just place it on top for garnish you could garnish this with some parmesan cheese if you wanted to or you know the basil is good let's take a taste and we'll see how we did such a wonderful there's a lot of layers of flavors going on there and I think it's really delicious I can taste a little hint of garlic the basil I can get a little hint of that and you definitely need that sugar because that really balances out that acid in the tomatoes so don't leave that out and you know what would go great with a nice bowl of tomato soup grilled cheese sandwiches right so I've got the recipe for you I'm going to leave a link for you right over here I show you three different grilled cheese sandwiches right over here click that and make that along with this soup and you're gonna have a fantastic meal thank you so much for watching don't forget to subscribe click the notification bell while you're at it so you'll be notified when new videos come out smash the like button and leave me a comment alright guys we'll see you next time