Creamy Tomato Bisque Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Is creamy tomato the same as tomato bisque? ›

While both are delicious, they are quite different, especially when it comes to the texture. Tomato bisque is thicker and creamier in texture, and calls for the use of milk and/or cream.

A bisque is a smooth, creamy French style of soup, traditionally made from crustaceans like lobster, crab or crayfish. It should include a stock made from the shells, a large amount of cream, and a thickening agent made from either finely-ground shells or rice.

This creamy tomato bisque recipe uses a combination of store-bought shortcuts like chicken broth and canned tomatoes along with aromatic vegetables to create a deeply flavorful soup that's ready in just over half an hour. Pureeing half of the bisque in a blender helps thicken it, as does adding a splash of heavy cream.

Start by using 1 tablespoon of cornstarch at a time, mixed with 2 tablespoons of water. More cornstarch slurry can be added, but be sure not to add too much. Only mix in a small amount of slurry at a time to ensure that your soup will thicken properly. Using corn starch is a fast, effective way to thicken soup.

Tomato soup is an excellent source of antioxidants, including lycopene, flavonoids, and vitamins C and E, among many others ( 3 , 7 ). Consuming antioxidants has been linked with a lower risk of cancer and inflammation-related diseases, such as obesity and heart disease ( 3 , 8 , 9 ).

Key Differences

Ingredients: Bisque is often made with seafood and enriched with heavy cream, whereas soup can be made with a wide range of ingredients, offering more versatility. Consistency: Bisque is consistently smooth and velvety, while soup can have a diverse range of consistencies, depending on the recipe.

Most modern bisques are thickened using rice. Some cook the rice in the broth and strain it out later, using only the left-behind rice starch to thicken the soup. Others puree the rice into the soup to thicken it. Almost all bisques are finished with hot cream for a velvety texture.

Authentic recipes for bisque actually ground the shells of the crustacean into a fine paste, using that to thicken the soup. Nowadays, it is more common to use rice as a thickener.

Other thickening techniques, such as using rice or a roux – a concoction of flour and butter — are far more common in today's cooking and are the preferred way of thickening most bisques.

Although tomato bisque is technically a soup, several clear-cut differences separate the two, the most apparent being the ingredients. The critical components for making tomato soup are tomatoes and either chicken or vegetable stock, while tomato bisque adds heavy cream to these ingredients.

How do you spruce up tomato bisque? ›

In a sealed nonreactive container, tomato soup will keep up to one week in the refrigerator, or six months in the freezer.

When you add baking soda to tomato soup (or sauce, or chili), it neutralizes the acid in the tomatoes. Not only will this make the tomatoes taste less acidic (good news if your tomatoes turned out more sour than you expected), but it also means that you can now add milk to your soup without risking curdling it.

Milk or Half-and-Half: This is the other magical ingredient that turns your homemade chicken noodle soup into the creamiest soup ever. Use 1 cup of whole milk or 1 cup of half-and-half.

To thwart the curdling tendency, changing procedures will render a smooth tomato soup. Heat the tomato mixture and cream separately, then slowly add tomatoes to the cream near the end of the cooking process. Once mixed, heat the mixture gently to 180 degrees. Do not boil.

But what about cream of tomato soup? Any “cream of” soup, tomato included, is pureed like a normal soup but then goes through a “creaming” process, wherein cream is added to the mixture. Cream of tomato soup is actually cooked at a much lower temperature than normal tomato soup.

A bisque is a cream soup, but a cream soup isn't always a bisque. To be a bisque the soup has to be made with a shellfish stock and will often include pieces of shellfish. Quite simply, no shellfish, no bisque.

Bisque is a smooth, creamy, highly seasoned soup of French origin, classically based on a strained broth (coulis) of crustaceans. It can be made from lobster, langoustine, crab, shrimp, or crayfish.

Cream of tomato soup is much richer and thicker than a classic tomato soup. As you'd expect, 'cream of' means cream is added to the soup. Cream of tomato soup is still cooked the same way as traditional tomato soup by blending but the cream adds a thickness and richness to the taste and texture.