3 Mistakes Everyone Makes When Cooking Soup

There's nothing better than a nice bowl of soup to warm you up in the fall. The possibilities are endless: pumpkin soup, mushroom soup, carrot soup with coconut milk -- you name it! You could probably have a different soup every week until the end of winter.

However, although making soup may not look like it requires top-notch cooking skills, there are several mistakes everyone makes that can spoil the taste of a soup. Here are three of them!

Not browning the vegetables

When making soup, we often tend to just put our peeled and chopped vegetables in the water and wait for them to cook. That's a huge mistake! To bring out all the flavours of your vegetables, it's best to brown them in a little oil or butter so they're lightly roasted. Then add the broth. The combination of the hot pan, the grilled vegetables, and the broth will allow the juices to develop. Your soup will be a lot less bland than usual.

Adding cream too early

If you want a creamy, thick soup, you can add cream, coconut milk, or fresh cheese to it. However, if you mix these dairy products with water during the cooking process, they will lose their flavour and be less effective at thickening the soup. Also, if you use too much water, your soup will be too runny or diluted.

The best way to avoid this is to cook the vegetables in the broth, strain them, then add water as you go when blending them to achieve the perfect consistency, and finally, add the cream.

Systematically adding potatoes

If you're in the mood for a thick soup, you'll probably stumble on a lot of recipes that have potatoes in their list of ingredients. If you want to cut down on carbs, you can skip the 04. Believe it or not, you can make a thick soup with vegetables alone. To achieve this, just use less water when cooking, or add nuts. You can also replace the potatoes with zucchini. Your soup will be lighter but still thick.