Tomato soup with blue cheese and bacon

Blue cheese has a strong and distinctive flavor, which is so outstanding in this soup. I like having this soup with freshly baked hard-crusted bread. As this type of bread stales quickly so whenever I make them, I often plan to prepare some soup to serve with bread as our main meal.

Blue cheese is already salty. My soup this time was a bit salty for our taste even if I used home-made chicken stock – to which I do not often add any salt, but after doing several seasonings, the final soup was still salty after I added the blue cheese. In addition to that, the bacon was a little salty, the hard crust bread was also a little salty, we could only get through our meal with a glass of water. So be careful with seasoning when you make this soup.

Ingredients: (serves 4)

- 1.3kg ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped

- 3 garlic cloves, crushed

- 30ml (2 tbs) cooking oil or butter

- 1 leek, white part only, sliced 

- 1 medium carrot, peeled and diced

- 1 lít (4 cups) unsalted chicken broth

- 115g blue cheese, crumbled

- 45ml (3 tbs) whipping cream

- several fresh basil or curve parsley

- salt, pepper

- 175g streaky bacon, cut into thin strips

Cooking:

- Preheat the oven to 200C (400F). Put the tomatoes in a baking dish, sprinkle with garlic, salt and pepper, then bake for 35 minutes.

- Heat the oil or butter in a large saucepan, add the leek, carrot and little salt and pepper, cook over low heat for 10 minutes or until veggies are tender, stirring occasionally.

- Add the chicken broth and baked tomatoes to the saucepan, bring to a boil then simmer for 20 minutes.

- Stir in the blue cheese, cream and basil or parsley. Remove from the heat, let cool slightly and process with a food processor or blender until smooth.

- Fry the bacon strips until crispy. Drain on kitchen towel.

- Reheat the soup if necessary. Serve the soup with crispy bacon pieces on top.