Roast Tomato Soup

Heat the oven to 200C/400F.

Put the tomatoes, onion wedges and unpeeled garlic into a large roasting tin.

Toss them with the olive oil and the 5g of fine salt.

Turn the tomatoes cut-side up.

Tuck the thyme sprigs in among them.

Spread everything into a single layer with a little space between the pieces. Crowded tomatoes steam in each other's water and stew rather than roast, which leaves you making the thin, simmered soup this recipe exists to avoid.

Roast for 45-50 minutes, until the tomatoes have collapsed and the cut edges have caught and blackened in places.

Do not pull the tin out when they merely look soft. Those dark, almost-burnt edges are the entire flavour of the soup, and a pale tray of roast tomatoes tastes like the tinned ones you started from.

Squeeze the garlic cloves out of their skins into the tin and discard the skins.

Lift out the thyme stalks, leaving behind any leaves that have dropped.

Scrape the roast vegetables and all the sticky juices into a blender.

Pour a splash of the hot stock into the empty tin and scrape the caramelised patches off the base with a spatula.

Tip that liquid into the blender.

Leave the jug no more than two-thirds full, blending in two batches if the tray has filled it higher than that.

Hold the lid down under a folded tea towel and bring the speed up from the lowest setting. A trayful of vegetables straight out of the oven goes on steaming inside a sealed jug, and that pressure lifts the lid clean off and throws scalding puree across the kitchen.

Blend with the rest of the stock for 60-90 seconds, until smooth. Only 400ml goes in, which makes it worth using the chicken stock from this collection rather than a cube.

Pour the soup through a coarse sieve into a pan, pressing hard on the pulp with a ladle and scraping the underside of the sieve. Skins and seeds are what make a blended tomato soup gritty, and this is the only step that takes them out.

Warm it through over medium heat for 3-4 minutes, to just under a simmer.

Stir in the red wine vinegar.

Taste it. Roast tomatoes vary enormously, and a flat-tasting batch usually wants a little more salt rather than more vinegar.

Ladle the soup into warm bowls.

Swirl a spoonful of the cream across the surface of each one and leave it unstirred, so it sits as a pale spiral rather than turning the whole bowl a flat pink.

Tear the basil over the bowls as you serve. Stirred into the hot pan it blackens within a minute.

Serve with the buttered toast for dipping. The everyday white tin loaf and the skillet flatbreads elsewhere in this collection both do the job.