Here’s another great winter warmer! With their striking, dark-red color and zingy taste, these soup shooters make wonderful appetizers — and they’re especially nice additions to your Valentine’s Day celebrations.
Tips for preparing the Easy 5-Ingredient Tomato, Zucchini and Basil Soup Shooters
This is a relatively quick and easy recipe. I think the most laborious part is chopping the zucchini into cubes — and even that isn’t very hard.
When you’re choosing the tomato juice, it’s important to select a brand with as few carbs, and as few added ingredients, as possible. Try to find one with no food additives at all. I found a brand in our local store that contains only tomato juice and salt. You can’t get any better than that! And, btw, it’s made in Cyprus.
But now let’s take a look at how to make these tasty soup shooters:
Place a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the tomato juice…
…the cubed zucchini…
…and the garlic powder.
Mix well.
Close the lid and bring to a boil.
Then reduce the heat to a minimum.
Let simmer until the zucchini is soft and tender, about 20 minutes.
Turn off the heat.
Add the chopped basil.
Pureé the soup until smooth.
I prefer using a handheld immersion blender, but you can use a traditional blender, too. Whatever method you use, be extra careful with the hot soup!
Season the soup with freshly ground black pepper if desired.
Pour or ladle into 6-8 schnapps or cordial glasses.
Drizzle some extra virgin olive oil on top of each serving. You can add more black pepper, too, if you like.
Enjoy!
My Tomato, Zucchini and Basil Soup Experiments
To be honest, I wasn’t planning to post this recipe on my blog now. No, I had bigger plans—and another recipe—on my mind. My original plan was quite ambitious: the 5-Ingredient Swedish Mazarines, which I had been developing since 2015. Now, I finally thought I had perfected the recipe and was ready to post it. However, when I was writing the post, I realized that I wasn’t perfectly happy with the filling, so I’d need to do some fine-tuning. And that meant I wouldn’t be able to post the recipe this week. I was disappointed: the mazarines would have been perfect for Valentine’s Day.
What now? I wanted to post my weekly recipe, but had to invent something quickly—something that would add to your Valentine’s Day celebrations. So I took a look at my idea list, and also at the recipes I’ve developed but haven’t yet posted.
One recipe caught my eye right away. It was called Easy 5-Ingredient Low-Carb Soup with Tomato, Zucchini and Basil, and I had developed it exactly one year ago.
The ingredients sounded flavorful: tomato juice, zucchini, onion powder, fresh basil, and extra virgin olive oil. According to my notes, I had cooked all the ingredients until the zucchini was soft—except for the basil, which I added after cooking to preserve its taste. Finally, I had pureéd the soup until smooth. I had decorated each serving with extra virgin olive oil, both for taste and to include some healthy fats.
From my notes I read that I had forgotten to add onion powder to my experiment, even though I had been planning to add it to the tomato juice and zucchini mixture. And the soup had tasted really intense, so I was planning to make the next experiment a bit mellower by adding heavy cream or coconut cream.
As I read on, I remembered that later on I had actually added 1 teaspoon onion powder to that same soup experiment, plus 1/3 cup (80 ml) heavy cream. Clearly, the taste was mellower, but I had noted that 1 teaspoon onion powder was too much: 1/2 teaspoon would suffice.
The more I looked at it the more intriguing this recipe became, and I was pondering how I could perfect it. Finally, I thought that I’d leave out the heavy cream and, because of its intense taste, I’d serve the soup in small schnapps glasses as soup “shooters.”
When I was doing the preparations for this blog post and was just about to start shooting the video, it occurred to me that garlic powder would fit better in this soup than onion powder (anyway, I overuse onion powder, as you can see from many of my recipes: it’s just so handy and lends such great flavor to almost any savory dish!)
But how much garlic powder should I use? 1/2 teaspoon might be too much, so I took 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder.
The other ingredients and their amounts I had planned out clearly — except I was a bit hesitant about how much olive oil I should drizzle onto each serving, now that I was serving them as soup shooters.
I concluded that 1 teaspoon olive oil per serving would be just right. More would make the soup too oily — and less would have been just pathetic.
When I pureéd the soup with my immersion blender, I was a bit suspicious of how the raw, chopped basil would blend in. Would the color become an ugly brown instead of a beautiful red? However, after mixing long enough, the soup became as smooth as I had hoped, and the color was still dark red — really gorgeous!
I tasted one serving which I had decorated with olive oil and black pepper. It tasted amazing! The flavor was bold, in the best possible way. Using raw basil was the right choice: it really added to the flavor. And garlic powder worked wonderfully, too. You really can’t go wrong with ingredients as great as tomato, zucchini, basil, and garlic!
My husband ate the rest of the soup that evening (yes, the whole batch!) with sour cream, and raved about the taste with every mouthful.
So, if you want something easy to impress your family or your guests, give this recipe a try! I guarantee you won’t be disappointed!
And here’s the recipe:
Easy 5-Ingredient Tomato, Zucchini and Basil Soup Shooters
Ingredients
- 3 cups = 700 ml tomato juice
- 1 medium (5 oz = 150 g) zucchini, cubed
- 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
- 1/4 cup = 60 ml finely chopped basil leaves, packed
- 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil for decorating
- (Optional: freshly ground black pepper to taste)
Instructions
- Place a saucepan over medium-high heat.
- Add the tomato juice, zucchini, and the garlic powder. Bring to a boil.
- Reduce the heat to a minimum. Let simmer, covered, until the zucchini is soft and tender, approximately 20 minutes.
- Add the chopped basil.
- Pureé the soup, preferably with a handheld immersion blender, until smooth. Add freshly ground black pepper if desired.
- Pour or ladle into 6-8 schnapps or cordial glasses.
- Drizzle the extra virgin olive oil on top of each of the servings (approximately 1 teaspoon olive oil per serving).
| Nutrition Information | Whole batch | Per serving if 6 servings in total | Per serving if 8 servings in total |
| Protein | 5.5 g | 0.9 g | 0.7 g |
| Fat | 29.8 g | 5.0 g | 3.7 g |
| Net carbs | 27.7 g | 4.6 g | 3.5 g |
| kcal | 427 kcal | 71 kcal | 53 kcal |
Tips for variation
As I wanted to make this recipe as easy as possible, I’ve used garlic powder here. However, instead of garlic powder, you can use 1-2 cloves fresh, crushed garlic for extra flavor: Add it together with the basil, after cooking the tomato juice and the zucchini but before pureéing the soup.
Since tomato juice contains already some salt, I didn’t need to add any salt to this dish. However, if you do need more salt, add natural salt like unrefined sea salt or Himalayan salt to taste.
To make the soup more satisfying, you can reduce the servings to two, and top each with cooked shrimp, fish, or chicken. Or, pair it with these Valentine’s Day Appetizer sandwiches for a perfect holiday combo!
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