Roasted Sweet Corn and Tomato Soup

Source: Our Best Bites

Ingredients / Preparation

The base of this soup is sweet, fresh corn. You'll need about 4 ears.

You can use any variety of garden tomatoes in your garden, just quarter them before roasting and you'll be good to go. You can buy 10 ounce containers of cherry tomatoes in the grocery store and those work great, too. I'm using a few red ones from the grocery store and a few of these little orange cutie-pies that my friend brought over.

You'll need to remove the corn from the corn cobs.

Toss the corn and tomatoes on a foil-lined baking sheet (the foil is simply for easy clean up; you can skip that step if you love scrubbing roasted vegetable gunk off of metal pans) and then we'll add a bunch of chopped garlic, a light sprinkling of kosher salt and fresh cracked black pepper, and a little drizzle of olive oil.

The oven then does magical things as the veggies roast and caramelize and release natural sugars. Your house will smell amazing.

While those are doing their thing in the oven, heat up a stock pot to medium high heat. Add a little olive oil and some diced onion.

I wanted the smoky sweetness of fire-roasted bell peppers, but I really didn't want to take the time to roast one myself, so I use a jar since it's something I almost always have in my pantry. An 8-ounce jar is equivalent to about 1 medium sized bell pepper.

Just give them a rough dice before you toss them in the pot.

The two seasonings that will give a ton of flavor to our roasted veggies are chipotle chili powder and smoked paprika. Both go beautifully with corn and tomatoes and are a perfect compliment to this flavor profile. Since we're making soup here, we definitely need some broth. Use chicken broth, unless you need to make this vegetarian and you can experiment with vegetable broth. When given the choice of the two however, I'll always go with chicken broth since it has more flavor.

Take the corn and tomatoes out of the oven when your tomatoes look all wrinkled.

The corn will probably be turning a little golden brown, but it's okay if it's not. Scrape every last bit of that pan into your soup pot and bring it to a simmer.  Cover the pot and keep it at a low simmer for about 20 minutes. All of those flavors come together in a sweet, smoky combination.

You can use an immersion blender to puree the soup, but I actually prefer my blender for this one since the corn has so much texture. Remember when you put anything hot in your blender to remove that little stopper at the top. It's important that the steam has somewhere to go. The other important step is that you cover it with a folded paper towel before you press start!

Puree the soup until it's smooth. Even after blending for quite a while, it will still have a little texture from the corn, which I like.