Last week, in the middle of the day, my friend Jen and I took a field trip to A. Litteri Inc. a reasonably priced, old-school Italian grocer in DC. A. Litterari is a small space crammed with cold pressed olive oil, dry wine, capers the size of olives, fresh pasta, and every other Italian ingredient you could imagine. I could spend hours in those narrow aisles, reading labels, dreaming up recipes, chatting with the deli clerk. Of course, I didn't have hours (it was, after all, the middle of a work day), so I settled quickly on a few things, one being a jar of San Marzano Marinara Sauce.
San Marzano tomatoes come from a small town of the same name located near Naples, where they were originally grown in the volcanic soil of Mount Vesuvius. I've heard things about San Marzano tomatoes. How good they are. How you will never make sauce with another tomato after you have tasted San Marzanos. Life changing tomatoes is what they are made out to be. And after I tasted the sauce that came out of this jar, I thought, yup, these tomatoes are seriously delicious. So instead of making boring old pasta, I made tomato soup. Let me distill the recipe in one simple word: pour.
Seriously. I poured the jar of tomato sauce and a 1/4 cup of heavy cream into a pan. Heated the "soup," and, after it was hot, added basil and Grana Padano. D-O-N-E. Tomato soup out of a jar that tastes homemade (and that was totally free of preservatives). The chunky tomato soup was sweet, meaty, bright, and perfectly balanced.