Turn a jar of pasta sauce into tomato soup, on the fly. Improv Soup makes use of leftover ingredients you already have on hand, such as pasta and veggies.

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Improv: Turn Pasta Sauce into Soup

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You love recipes, amiright? But you don’t always have time to plan for them. Sometimes manning the kitchen means swinging open the refrigerator door and figuring out what you can do with what you’ve got. Welcome to Improvisation № V/i: This is the 1st in a 2-part Improv Soup series.

Improvisation is a method. A method applies a set of principles to a circumstance in order to produce a course of action. A recipe is that course of action. With good instincts, you can improvise some damned tasty dishes. It’s a solid way to pull some everynight dinners out of your hat like a hometown hero. Yes, you risk occasionally creating some flops – a dependable method will help to make that rare.

Thick and Chunky Tomato Soup

What goes with what?

You’re asking that question as you stand in front of the open fridge. It’s fucking cold outside. You’re in the mood for a nice, hot, hearty soup. You have some leftover store-bought pasta sauce. You let those two ideas mix around in your head, and you decide to see if you can turn that sauce into a tomato soup base. Once you make that leap, you rifle through your fridge, hauling out whatever seems like a good fit.

What flavors, textures, and ingredients will a store-bought pasta sauce support?

1. Check the label. You’re going to dilute the sauce in order to produce a soup-like texture, so adding any of its original flavors back in is going to work.
2. Anything you’d like in a spaghetti sauce or on a pizza is worth consideration.
3. In terms of texture, if you have a blender (or, even easier, a stick blender), you can turn a chunky soup into a purée. You can also put a cup or so of the soup in the blender, purée it, return it to the pot, and wind up with a happy medium.^[1]

Method:

You’re going to sauté, simmer, finish, and garnish. Put each of your ingredients^[2] into one of those categories, based on the following info:

Sauté Ingredients

Sauté

Some ingredients, like bacon, need to be cooked. Bacon works in a chunky tomato soup, but it also makes a nice garnish. Cook it up front in either case. Sautéing the other ingredients in the rendered fat will establish your dominance as an alpha who is not to be fucked with. If you’d rather use butter or olive oil … whatever. It’s your improv; do what you want.

Some ingredients, like vegetables, don’t need to be cooked, but usually are when used in a soup. Cooking changes a vegetable’s flavor and texture. Cooking also releases a vegetable’s flavor into the soup, helping to create a tasty and homogeneous dish.

When adding spices to a soup, you want to give them ample time to work their flavors into the soup. If your soup isn’t going to simmer for a long time, throw them in during the sauté.

So, start with the sauté,^[3] and get the ingredients to the point that they are slightly underdone.

Simmer Ingredients

Simmer

Store-bought sauce is standing in for broth in this soup. Because it’s already cooked and seasoned, it needs to be simmered only long enough to meld with the sautéed ingredients. Add water or any kind of stock to thin it out. If you have other ingredients that need only to be heated rather than cooked, add them at this point as well. Some sausages, like smoked kielbasa, are already cooked. If this is the case, it will say so clearly on the label. Other sausages need to be cooked. If you don’t see something on the packaging that clearly indicates otherwise, cook your sausage during the sauté stage. Cook it separately from the vegetables so that you can pour off the excess fat, if necessary.

Add your simmering ingredients to the sauté, and simmer just until the very moment that the sauté ingredients are perfectly al dente.

Finishing Ingredients

Finish

There are certain ingredients that merely may need to be warmed, and would be better off if they missed the simmer. For instance, fully cooked pasta just needs to soak a bit in the soup, not cook in it. Cook it, and it will turn to mush. Milk products usually go in this category, too. They have cooking characteristics that may not be intuitive.

Add your finishing ingredients to the simmer, off heat. If need be, with the lowest flame, bring your soup back to temperature.

Garnish

Garnish

Garnishing is often done for looks. However, there are other reasons you might garnish. I usually don’t give a damn, but garnishing with bacon should always be up for discussion. If you reserve the bacon for use as a garnish, it will retain its manly crunch and its flavor will have a bit of independence.

Notes:

See Also:

Continue Reading: Part 2, Thick and Chunky Tomato Soup →