7 Amazing Tips to Make Your Soup Recipes Tastier and Healthier
Of all recipes, a soup is a wonderful dish because it’s easy to make, delicious, nutritious, and you can make it in countless ways. Moreover, vegetarians and non-vegetarians can enjoy it equally with their favorite ingredients. But do you know that besides basic recipes of soups, you can make many modifications and make them even better? Here we have collected a few such tips that will help you improve your experience with soups.
1. Add the Spicy Aroma
If you want to make your soups extremely tastier, don’t hesitate to add herbs and spices. There are plenty of them including onion, garlic, ginger, pepper chilies, black pepper, coriander, basil, mint and many more. If you don’t want an intense spiciness, you can just add black pepper, and enjoy your tasty soup.
2. Make Healthy Tasty Stock On Your Own
Not all soups need a stock base, e.g. onion soup and tomato soup. But when the soup recipes need stock, you can make it on your own. You can make it easily and it will be better than anything you can buy at a store, both in health as well as taste point of view. The store-bought stocks in the form of liquids or powders or pastes are convenient. But they are costly and packed with preservatives and salt. Instead you can just stock chicken bones in your fridge, and whenever you plan to make a stock, you can take them in a pot with water up to the level of immersing them and simmer them for many hours. You can even add any vegetables, herbs or spices you like, and your tasty, healthy stock is ready!
3. Thicken Your Soup
A thicker, heartier soup is fulfilling. Fortunately there are umpteen ways with which you can make your soup thick. Here are a few:
- Add cream or milk and simmer till it becomes thick
- Add a can of pureed beans to the soup
- Mash a couple of potatoes and add them to the soup. This works well especially with bean and chowders soup.
- Use a roux
4. To Cover the Pot or Not
Many home chefs wonder whether to cover the soup while cooking or not. This depends on the outcome you want. Leaving it open will make liquid part evaporate faster, creating a thicker and possibly more flavorful soup. On the other hand, leaving the soup covered will reduce the rate of evaporation, but the soup ingredients will be cooked well and faster.
5. Make Children’s Favorite Meals by adding Noodles
If you want your kids to have something nutritious in the form of soup but they are not very much into soups, you can turn your soup recipes to their liking by adding noodles to them. You can even add ramen, spaghetti, bowtie pasta, elbow or whatever they like, and they will be fascinated.
6. Use Ingredients that are Fresh or Frozen Rather Than Canned
While the idea of soup-making precludes the concept that almost anything should go, some prepared foods should be kept away from the list of your ingredients of soups.
Let’s understand fresh and frozen. Both these mean foods you purchase or use that have not been added preservatives, colors or flavors and have not already been cooked and processed. These may come from your garden or grocer.
On the other hand, canned foods have already been cooked completely and lend little to no flavor or nutrition to the fantastic co-mingling of flavors in the process of soup-making. There may be a few exceptions like canned tomatoes, which you can use to add taste and texture; but canned green peas, beans, potatoes and carrots come in the above category of foods imparting nothing to your soup. So, prefer fresh or frozen to canned.
7. Make Your Soup Creamier
You may think that it can be made so just by adding cream. But if you want to avoid calories brought in by cream, you can add yogurt instead and get the same yummy taste without a stash of calories.
Use these tips to make your soups increasingly tastier and healthful and enjoy them in a true sense.