15-Minute Creamy (Vegan!) Tomato Soup + a Call for Your Best Beginner Cooking Tips

Every week in Genius Recipes—often with your help!—Food52 Creative Director and lifelong Genius-hunter Kristen Miglore is unearthing recipes that will change the way you cook.

In this moment of renewal and return to normal kitchen life, I would like to give you a gift: a 15-minute, extremely cozy and smart tomato soup that will improve the lots of all of us. The weeknight speed demons, vegans, grilled cheese obsessives, parents of small children, solo diners, and, perhaps most of all, cooks who are just beginning. And I’m going to ask a favor in return: I want your favorite beginner recipes and tips. But we’ll get to that!

First: this simple, powerful, giving little soup.

Of all the clever things J. Kenji López-Alt has done in his career—the Food Lab cookbook and column at Serious Eats, the years clocked at America’s Test Kitchen and on restaurant lines—this 15-minute soup is one of his favorites, and the one he makes most often.**

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Here’s how Kenji gets maximum mileage out of a few pantry staples in only 15 minutes:

First, he slices an onion very thinly and grates a couple cloves of garlic, so that they cook swiftly as soon as they land in hot oil, with a hit of dried oregano and dried chile flakes sizzling along with them. In other, mellower recipes, these aromatics would enter and build in layers so chunks of onion can soften without garlic burning, fresh herbs can keep their mojo. But here, they’re prepped and timed perfectly so you can get on with your soup, and your night.

Next is the one-two punch that allows him to conjure a creamy soup without any cream or butter: Punch 1) He adds a little sandwich bread in with the tomatoes to break down as he brings the soup up to a boil. Punch 2) Then, after a 5-minute simmer as a quick icebreaker for all the ingredients, he blends the soup while slowly streaming in olive oil. Much like in making gazpacho, the bread helps the oil latch on and emulsify into a lighter, thicker, creamier soup that softens all the spicy, acidic edges. Kenji says you could consider this hot gazpacho.

So there’s your perfect little soup recipe for the new year, featuring a few genius tricks you can use next time you want to smooth out a harsh-tasting soup or sauce or stew, or thicken a wan one, or get to onion-garlic-spice harmony super fast.

But before you run off to get your grilled-cheese station ready, I’d love to hear from you: What other recipes and unexpected tips have made the biggest difference for you, or for your kids, timid partners, or friends who are new to cooking but want desperately to feel less so? The beginner-friendly tricks that don’t take a lot of earned muscle memory in the kitchen, that will inspire and reward people who are new to cooking, and not punish them for misstepping or lacking exactly the right pan size or appliance or fancy ingredient in their pantry. Those tricks. I know you’ve got them!

Here’s why: I’m starting to work on Genius Cookbook #3, following on the heels of Genius Recipes and Genius Desserts. This new one is for beginners and skill-sharpeners, and I’m really hoping it can provide a different, more intuitive and visually inspiring companion for budding cooks than your average cooking manual. To pull this off, just like last time, I’m going to need your help. Here are a few questions to start you off:

1) What are the recipes that you think will change a beginning cook’s life? They can be general (fried rice) or specific (Roberto Santibañez’s Classic Guacamole).

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2) What books or cooking teachers made the biggest impact on you when you were first learning to cook?

3) What are the rules that have made you feel more powerful and successful in the kitchen? I’m not looking for read the recipe first or mise en place, useful as they may be, since those are often the first things books say to do. I want the unexpected lessons you remember from an old Two Fat Ladies episode or Julie Sahni cookbook, or the ones you learned the hard way.

4) What are the oft-said rules you really don’t have to follow? For example: replace your spices every 6 months. Nope, not doing that. How about instead: know that spices lose their oomph over time, and replace them when it will matter for what you’re cooking (or use a little more in a pinch)?

5) Anything else you really, really want me to know?

Thank you, once again, for sharing your wisdom with all of us—I know you’ll have strong opinions. I can’t wait to hear them.

**In fact, as Kenji recently told me, “I literally just made that soup for [my daughter] Alicia last week when we got to our Airbnb after a nine-hour car ride with virtually no fresh ingredients stocked in the kitchen. I think I cut it down to about 7 minutes ;)”

Got a genius recipe to share—from a classic cookbook, an online source, or anywhere, really? Please send it my way (and tell me what’s so smart about it) at [email protected]—thank you to magical writer and cook (and former Food52 editor) Caroline Lange for this one!