What's The Best Secret Ingredient To Thicken Soup?

Soup may be the last thing on your mind if you live in a part of the world that's experiencing a heat wave — like Los Angeles, which played host to a brutal So Cal ripper recently, per CBS News, or Rome, which hit its highest temperature on record last month (per The Washington Post). You'd much rather have a bowl of Japanese ice-cold somen noodles with ginger, scallions, and Tsuyu dipping sauce (via Just One Cookbook). Or perhaps you'd prefer a hearty summer salad with grocery store rotisserie chicken, kale, and peaches. We get it; you don't want to eat anything that requires sweating over a boiling pot while you're already sweating from the summer heat. But what if we said you could have soup in the summer and stay cool doing it? Dishes like cold borscht, gazpacho, and cucumber soup are as refreshing and cooling as any other summer dish, and most of them can be made without a stove in sight. 

That said, there's an art to making even the simplest soup, especially if you're improvising, and sometimes the end result is simply too watery. If that's ever happened to you, read on for a trick to thicken up your soup at any stage of the cooking (or not-cooking) process. 

If you've ever made a big bowl of Panzanella salad,  a delightful Tuscan-style tomato and bread dish that J. Kenji Lopez-Alt calls "the best salad of the summer" in his Serious Eats recipe, you know that bread has a place far beyond your buttered toast. You might also know that, if you find yourself with a lot of leftover Panzanella, you can blitz it up in your blender for an easy batch of gazpacho. The stale or dried-out bread that plays a starring role in the salad works overtime to turn your summer soup into a hearty, perfectly seasoned refresher, and it also goes to show how bread can add body to any other soup. 

Indeed, Epicurious calls bread "the secret to thicker, heartier soups," adding that using "old and stale bread" is a tried-and-true method often found in Mediterranean cooking. "Thickening soups with bread is an easy way to add texture and bulk," writes the outlet. "It turns a simple bowl of broth into a full meal." This can be achieved by placing a slice of bread at the bottom of each individual serving bowl, stirring breadcrumbs into the pot before serving, or throwing in "in big hunks of bread" while your soup simmers. If you're making a cold soup, adding breadcrumbs or bread pieces to your blender will yield similar results.