I love to make soup so I got a chinois to get puréed soups smoother. It worked beautifully on the first soup, a carrot and ginger. But yesterday I made a roasted tomato soup and the texture was nice and maybe too thick when I put it through the chinois. When it came out I,had a whole lot of waste in the chinois and a very tasty but almost a tomato broth. I spent a lot of time adding tomatoes, etc to thicken it. What could I have done wrong?
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I’m not sure if you did anything “wrong” necessarily, the chinois may just be too fine of a mesh for what you like in your tomato soup.
That said, you could try cooking your tomatoes longer and maybe even using a stick blender to break them down more before putting through the chinois. Tomatoes have a lot of internal structure to them, so if that isn’t broken down enough, it will never fit through the chinois. Just a thought.
What types of tomatoes were you using too? That might impact how much work it might take to break down the tomato to get more pulp.
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I roasted broke and roasted San marzano canned tomatoes. They were pretty soft. Maybe I should,have just used something less fine. It worked perfectly on my carrot and ginger soup.
The fibers in carrot and tomato are different. The carrot fibers are tougher when raw, but they become pulpy and almost like a paste when cooked. Tomato fibers are softer and stretchier to begin with, but they don’t yield to heat as much. So when you push cooked tomatoes through a fine-mesh strainer, the fibers will get held back and only the watery part will get pushed through. Better to use an immersion blender with tomato soups and not worry about straining.
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100-mesh, 30-mesh, they come in different mesh sizes and yours was too fine for the outcome you had planned for the dish.
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