Why Would You Ever Put Ice In Soup?

One of my favorite kitchen purchases in recent years — or ever, come to think of it — was a refrigerator with an ice maker. Even though it was kind of a splurge (despite the significant scratch-and-dent markdown), it's such a luxury to have an endless supply of ice on hand. Water tastes so much better when it's chilled, and adding ice to a lukewarm cup of coffee or tea instantly transforms a blah beverage into a much more enjoyable drink. Still, one thing that never occurred to me until quite recently is putting ice cubes in soup. Some people swear by it, however, and their reasons seem pretty legit.

Adding a few ice cubes to your soup, whether it be canned, store-bought, restaurant leftovers, or homemade, can serve several functions ranging from temperature regulation to controlled dilution to removing an unwanted cooking byproduct. The best part is that we're just talking about plain old ice cubes. While you could certainly plan ahead and make michelada ice cubes to wake up a bowl of bland vegetable or tomato soup, each one of the helpful hints here requires nothing more than ice made with tap water. 

One way some people attempt to cool down too-hot soup involves blowing on it, but Miss Manners says it's rude to do so. While this censure need not preclude you from performing the act while dining solo in the privacy of your own home, you may have to huff and puff for a few minutes before you lower the temperature of a single spoonful. It could get kind of messy, too, if you accidentally blow too hard and splatter the soup. Instead, you can outsource the job to ice cubes.

Start by adding just a single ice cube to your soup and stirring it in. If this doesn't do the trick, you can always add more cubes. Ice, when introduced to hot liquid, will naturally melt, and hot liquid plus cold liquid equals slightly less hot liquid. Yes, the melting ice will dilute the soup to a certain extent, but then again, some soups — especially starchy ones or ones that include a lot of collagen in the broth – will thicken as they cool. Even if your soup isn't the kind to do so, an ice cube's worth of liquid (which is about two tablespoons on average) shouldn't water it down too much.

One thing we can say about practically everyone on earth is that tastes differ (this probably goes double if there's life on other planets). This means that while I, personally, am always looking for a way to spice up my store-bought soups, there may be others who consider certain soups to be a bit too spicy for their liking. And I'll admit that I have encountered an incendiary restaurant soup or two that I feel could be taken down a notch. As it turns out, the small amount of water from a melted ice cube can help to temper the heat while it also cools down the soup.

This same soup dilution trick works just as well for fixing overly salty soup. Canned soups in particular are said to have high levels of salt, although I for one have seldom been able to taste it. Rather, I often use the salt shaker quite liberally when doctoring up store-bought soup, and even more so when making my own. Sometimes I overdo it, though, so it's good to know that there's a handy-dandy soup de-salter (that being an ice cube) as close as my refrigerator door.

POV: You are making a pot of homemade chicken broth (using the stock bag from your freezer packed with vegetable trimmings, chicken bones, and skin) and you look down and see a layer of grease on the top. Yep, chicken skin will do that, since each ounce has 11 grams of fat. Now, ordinarily you'd refrigerate the broth overnight and simply remove the layer of solidified fat in the morning (saving it to make chile-garlic hot sauce or skillet chicken thighs with schmaltzy matzo crumble, of course). The thing is, you need this stock ASAP for another recipe. How can you de-grease it in a hurry? With ice cubes, of course.

Take a large spoon and skim off as much of the grease as you can, then empty an ice cube tray into the stock pot. The remaining fat, or a significant portion of it, should solidify around the ice cubes, which you'll then need to fish out right away before they melt and release the grease. To save the schmaltz, you can stick the fat-covered cubes in the fridge. When the ice melts into chilled water, the fat should stay solid enough to remove with a strainer.

One more reason why you might want to add ice to your soup is because that particular soup is meant to be served chilled in the first place. There are a number of such soups, including the tomato and vegetable-based Spanish gazpacho, the Eastern European beet soup called borscht, and the creamy potato soup that's known as vichysoisse en Français. Less well known, at least in the U.S., may be fruktsuppa, which is a Scandinavian sweetened fruit soup served as a summery dessert.

Some of these chilled soups may require cooking, while others include room-temperature ingredients, so they typically require several hours of refrigeration to reach the proper serving temperature. A workaround for this, however, is to drop in a bunch of ice cubes and let them work their magic. In order not to dilute the soup too much, you can reduce the amount of liquid used in the soup. One cube, allowed to melt completely, will release approximately an ounce of water, so bear this in mind when making your calculations.