You Should Absolutely Be Turning Leftover Soup Into Pasta Sauce
Soup is winter's ultimate comfort food. It's easy to consume, (usually) has a warming effect, and satiates your appetite with just one bowl. Soups, however, can also sometimes be one-note. Once you've made a batch, there isn't always much elbow room to explore different ways to make each bowl interesting. That's where pasta comes in.
Pasta is the perfect way to bring new life to many kinds of soup, and can create a whole new dish out of it. Soups are usually whipped together in big batches, so if you start to get bored as you chow through your deli containers full of leftovers, turn them into a pasta sauce to make the tasting experience more enjoyable.
The perfect ratio is about 1 pound of pasta to around 3 cups of leftover soup. As always, saving some leftover pasta water will make the soup-sauce more silky, and helps bind it with the noodles. If you still feel bored with the soup even when it's a sauce, add some unexpected yet complementary garnishes to bring the dish to an entirely different level. You could try fried garlic chips, or crunchy poppy seeds, for example. Consider what other ingredients you have in your fridge, pantry, or spice cabinet, and add them to the soup-sauce pasta, incorporating new flavors and textures into the final dish.
The soups that suit pasta and those that don't
Like most food categories, soup is a diverse one. There are blended soups, chowders, and iced soups — and not all of them are suitable for the pasta pairing. It fares best to consider using blended soups, as their sauce-like consistency is ready to be tossed through cooked pasta after being heated up. Just remember to reheat soup gradually, and stir it frequently for a good consistency.
Dairy, such as canned milk which makes slow cooker soups even richer, is a common addition to yield a silky result, but be extra attentive when warming cream-based soups as the texture can deteriorate. For the best results, use a low heat.
Though we advise not boiling soup when cooking it, thin soups can be simmered down to a thicker consistency if you wish to turn these into a pasta sauce. A broth-based soup, for example, is most likely too thin. Letting the broth reduce to a saucy texture both concentrates the flavors and better prepares the soup to cling onto the pasta. Chunky, multi-consistency soups may not do so well turned into a pasta sauce, as the two paired together may create textural mayhem. However, simply blending these soups can give them a new lease of life as a sauce.