Gordon Ramsay's Powerful Secret For Flavorful Tomato Soup

When it comes to warming winter comfort foods, you can't do better than grilled cheese and tomato soup. That particular pairing is as close to universally beloved food as anything can be — and while everyone likely has their own way of making it, there are always ways to squeeze more flavor out of the humble tomato. Very few people know more about flavor than Michelin-starred chef and all-around culinary savant Gordon Ramsay. Scotland's second biggest contribution to global cuisine (after the deep-fried candy bar, of course) has a particularly ingenious, simple technique for adding flavor to your tomato soup: a pesto topping made of sun-dried tomatoes.

Sun-dried tomatoes lose all their water through the drying process, resulting in a tomatoey flavor concentrated into a deep, rich sweetness. A perfect balance of sweet, savory, and umami. In his tomato soup recipe on YouTube, Ramsay uses a pestle and mortar to make pesto out of his sun-dried tomatoes. Grinding them up intensifies the flavors even more, by breaking down the cell walls in the tomato and expressing its oils. To make it a proper pesto, he adds toasted pine nuts, parmesan, extra-virgin olive oil, and freshly cracked black pepper. But it's not the only tomato soup secret Ramsay has up his sleeve.

For his soup, Gordon Ramsay first simmers his tomatoes in a deep pan, then transfers them to the oven to roast. That way, the tomatoes get a chance to develop blistered tops, deepening the flavor of the soup. When he takes them out again, he adds stock and breaks up his tomatoes with a wooden spoon as they simmer some more on the stovetop. Ramsay then adds heavy cream to his soup, creating a beautifully smooth, luxurious dish.

For his next trick, Ramsay uses a potato masher to mash the ingredients together. He clarifies that you could either opt for a smooth soup by blending the tomatoes or a rustic soup by mashing them. Mashing the tomatoes still releases those roasted flavors into the soup, but it leaves the tomatoes chunky. If you are pairing your soup with grilled cheese (and let's face it, you should be), this'll result in a lovely interplay of creaminess and crunchiness, of tang from the cheese and warmth from the soup. If you want more tang, you can always add some crème fraîche instead of regular heavy cream.

One of the reasons sun-dried tomatoes work so well as a flavor enhancer is that they're packed with umami. This mythical "fifth taste" (along with salty, sweet, sour, and bitter) translates from Japanese to "delicious savory taste." It's dark, meaty, and savory all at once, and it magically deepens the flavors of the other four tastes. Adding more of it to your soup can help to intensify that tomatoey-ness and make for a much more complex profile.

While sun-dried tomatoes lend some umami to your soup, they're not the only umami-packed ingredient you can use. Dried mushroom powder is also full of the stuff, as are anchovies. Using a couple, crushed into a paste and stirred through the soup, won't make it taste fishy; it'll just boost the other flavors.

If you want to stick to the Ramsay way of doing things, break out one of his favorite ingredients: Worcestershire sauce. This concoction with bizarre origins is made of onions, garlic, molasses, and anchovies (to give a very condensed list of ingredients). Ramsay uses it as part of the roux for a traditional Welsh Rarebit (think of it as the British answer to grilled cheese), but you can also add it to your soup for an added boost of flavor. For more Gordon Ramsay cooking tips (including what not to do), check out that time Ramsay gave us all terrible grilled cheese advice.