Thickening agent

Soup Tips - Soup Thickening Agents

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• published: 02 Aug 2015
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Soup Tips - Soup Thickening Agents Soup is the ultimate comfort food. It's hot, delicious, and it fills you up and warms you from the inside out. But sometimes you make a soup and it ends up thinner than you'd like, and you want to make it thicker. What should you do? Here are some soup thickening agents you can use. You have the choice of either adding a thickening agent to the soup, or using the ingredients already in the soup to make it thicker. Some ingredients make creamy, thick broths as they cook down. These include lentils, split peas, and mung beans. As long as you don't add too much water, you'll end up with a thick, hearty soup. Blending and mashing Another way to thicken your soup is by blending or mashing some of the ingredients. You can use a potato masher and smash some of them. Leave some of them whole, to get nice texture. I do this with a Portuguese Bean Soup recipe I make. Without mashing, I get a watery broth with chunks of potato, carrot, and beans. After I mash part of the soup, I get a thick, creamy mixture loaded with beans, carrots and potatoes. Delicious! You can also use a blender to blend part or all of your soup. This works especially well if you have a starchy ingredient in your soup, such as potatoes or pumpkin. The starch creates a velvety texture. Slurry A slurry is a mixture of starch and water. You can use any number of starches, including cornstarch, flour, potato starch, rice flour, arrowroot, or tapioca starch. But the properties of each differ. For example, a flour slurry will end up with a cloudy or opaque soup. Cornstarch slurries end up clear or translucent. To use a slurry, blend the starch with a small amount of COLD water until it is dissolved. Then add to your soup and stir constantly until the soup boils and the mixture thickens. Often it will thicken even more as it cools. Cooked roux Roux is the classic thickening method used in Cajun and Creole cooking in Louisiana. Gumbo gets its thickness and flavor in large part from the roux. Basically, equal parts of fat and flour are used. Fat can be lard, bacon fat, shortening, oil, or butter. The mixture is cooked and stirred for up to several hours. It must be watched carefully so it doesn't burn. The starches in the flour brown and produce a rich flavor and dark color. Each cook will have a special mixture and procedure to make their dishes shine in their own fabulous way.