How To Use Your Oven To Shave Off Time When Making Homemade Soup

Wintertime often has people fantasizing about devoting hours to making home-cooked meals, but most of us are just as busy during this season as any other. Homemade soup, however, can be relatively effortless: Toss meat and/or vegetables in a pot, add seasonings, and simmer it until it tastes just right. But even a simple soup recipe can be improved by incorporating the right shortcuts, and one great shortcut is pre-roasting the vegetables. Not only will roasting soften hard vegetables, but it deepens flavors as well. One popular Instagram recipe for butternut squash tomato soup combines the two classics, throwing both squash and cherry tomatoes in the oven to cook along with onion, garlic, and basil. Once all the vegetables are baked, they only need to simmer for a few minutes in the soup pot with added liquid. 

If the vegetables used by the Instagrammer aren't to your liking, you can bake asparagus, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, mushrooms, or just about any others you can think of, since very few vegetables won't make good soup. (Maybe not cucumbers, they're not at their best when cooked.) Other herbs and spices will also work just fine — rosemary, sage, and cilantro are all soup-worthy, while the classic Polish zupa koperkowa z ziemniakami shows how well dill goes with potatoes. (You can even flavor soups with leftover herb stems from other recipes.) If you like a spicy soup, you could also roast fresh chiles. Soup is a very forgiving dish. For the most part, if you like it, you can soup it.

Cooking a soup on the stove top (or finishing it off there, as in the above video) does make for good visuals if you're filming the process for social media. If a slow-simmering soup recipe takes hours to cook, however, many home cooks prefer to outsource the process to their trusty crockpots for a hands-free experience. Did you know, though, that you can take such a soup recipe — or just about any of those easy slow cooker recipes, for that matter — and cook it in the oven? An oven makes quite a handy slow cooker stand-in and doesn't even require any counter space.

To make soup in the oven, you'll need a pot that's fairly sturdy and lidded. (No pot lid? A sheet of aluminum foil will work.) Just like a crockpot, an oven, too, can be set to either high or low, with the high temperature being, in this case, 275 degrees Fahrenheit. At this temperature, your soup should be done in four hours. If you want it to cook all day while you're at work, set the temperature to 175 degrees Fahrenheit, and it should safely simmer for anywhere from six to ten hours. While the oven won't switch to a lower setting once the soup is cooked, many models will automatically shut off after 12 hours.