Salad Dressing Is The Secret Ingredient For Upgrading Canned Soup

When it comes to convenience foods, it doesn't get much simpler (or cheaper) than a can of soup. When you don't feel like cooking something from scratch, want a nutritious meal in a jiff, or you're sick on the couch, there's always soup. Just pop the top off, heat it up, and you've got a quick lunch or dinner. The trouble with soup in a can, though, is that it's almost always pretty forgettable. You don't have to live with ho-hum soup, however, because there's a super easy way to jazz it up: Add a few tablespoons of salad dressing.

It might sound kind of weird, but adding salad dressing to soup actually makes a lot of culinary sense. Canned soup tastes boring because it loses a lot of zest when it's cooked for the canning process, but with a little acid and some aromatics, you can brighten up the flavor. You don't need to scour the spice cabinet either, because remember, you're not trying to cook anything complicated. Salad dressing already has herbs, vinegar, fat, and other ingredients like cheese that will make your soup taste great, and all you have to do is just dump some in and stir.

While it's true that canned soup can taste boring, take a "glass half full" perspective and think of it as a blank slate instead. Someone did the work of making a base soup for you, and all you need to do is add some ingredients to make it shine. Store-bought salad dressing, in contrast to canned soup, is packed with flavor. You just have to figure out which soup and salad dressing combinations work, and the best way to do that is to get the bottles out of the fridge and experiment.

You don't have to start randomly pouring salad dressing into your soup to find a successful flavor match, either. There are lots of combinations that naturally make sense, like balsamic vinaigrette and tomato soup. This dressing typically has Italian herbs like oregano and basil, which taste great with tomatoes, and the balsamic vinegar adds acidity and flavor complexity. Classic ranch, which lives in almost every refrigerator, is ideal for any type of potato bisque, like loaded baked potato, or tastes great with a corn chowder. Thousand Island dressing can add some richness and body to anything that is brothy and thin, and one tablespoon only adds about 60 calories if you're eating a "light" soup (which is often also light on flavor).

The stakes are pretty low when it comes to mixing soup and salad dressing because canned soups are typically pretty inexpensive, so don't feel like you can't try an unconventional pairing. You might be surprised by some of the combinations that taste good. Try adding creamy blue cheese dressing to a brothy vegetable soup, for example. The creamy dressing will add some richness to the broth and the blue cheese will give the soup a salty tang that will contrast nicely with the vegetables, just like it does on a salad. You can also add some creamy Caesar to an Italian wedding soup to give it a little extra creaminess and cheesy parmesan saltiness.

If you're leery of mixing ingredients, remember that you already like all the flavors of salad dressing in your refrigerator, so just think of your can of soup as a hot, liquid salad that just needs a little something extra. Unless you choose a really wacky combination, chances are whatever salad dressing you choose will probably work. Try mixing a teaspoon or so into just a ladle's-worth of soup and testing it out before scaling it up for the entire batch. If you don't like that combo, you can send that little bit down the drain without sacrificing the rest of the can, and then try again with different dressings until you find the one that fits.