Improve the Texture of Your Vegetable Soup with This Simple Tip

There’s nothing more comforting than a bowl of homemade soup; the flavors of your ingredients develop deeply while the pot simmers on the stove and delicious smells waft through your whole house. It’s disappointing then to find the texture of your bowl of goodness a little lackluster, even when you followed the recipe to a tee. Pureed veggie soups can sometimes leave you unsatisfied, as there’s little in the way of chewing. There’s a simple remedy that you can use for any recipe, though. Before you puree all of the ingredients together, remove a quarter to a half of the cooked vegetable chunks. Blend the remaining veggies and liquid into a puree, and then add the vegetable chunks back in.

This technique can be used for most vegetable soups, from potato leek to tomato. You can leave your vegetables in large chunks, or chop them up a bit before adding them into the base of the soup. If you don’t want chunks of say, tomato, in the soup, simply remove some of your diced sauteed onions (or other mirepoix-esque base veggies) before adding the rest of the ingredients to the pot, and return them once the soup has been blended. For non-pureed vegetable soups, textural variance is still key; in this case chop your veggies in slightly different sizes, from large to small. You could also flip the technique for these types by removing about a quarter of the veggies, blending them, and add the mixture back into the non-pureed soup to thicken the broth just slightly.

There are some other cases in which your soup might need some help in the texture department. You might find your chicken tortilla soup broth to be too thin rather than a textured base that suspends all the ingredients. To thicken chicken tortilla soup, simply add in more fried corn tortillas. They will release starch that thickens the liquid base. When defrosting frozen soup, you might be disappointed with the one-note texture of the thawed ingredients that once had more bite. To fix the texture problem of thawed frozen soups, add crunch with toppings like croutons and toasted nuts or seeds. And if you happen to be an avid home baker, sourdough discard is the trick to thickening any soup and adding a pleasant tang.

While crusty bread or croutons are the traditional accompaniment for soup, you can get creative with ways to add contrasting texture. Try air-frying some of the veggies used in your soup of choice to crisp them up and serve on top. If all else fails, pan-fry some shallots until golden and crispy around the edges and throw those into the mix; they’ll always add a welcome final layer of flavor and texture.