Beefy Tomato Soup | An Easy, Beef & Macaroni Soup Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How do you make soup taste meaty? ›

If you are adding meat to a soup, sear or brown it in a sauté pan before you add it to the soup. This adds a deeper savory flavor to the whole soup. This trick is especially useful for things like chicken and sausage, which can sometimes get bland and rubbery while floating in a brothy soup.

Add Flour Or Cornstarch

You can thicken soup by adding flour, cornstarch, or another starchy substitute. For the best results, never add flour or cornstarch directly to your soup. If you do, it will clump up on top. Instead, ladle a small amount of broth into a separate bowl and let it cool.

To ensure you get it just right, make sure the soup is nearly cooked before adding the pasta. Smaller pasta shapes soak up broth readily so ensure you serve the soup as soon as it's cooked. Alternatively, you could cook the pasta separately and add to the soup at the last moment.

Many cream of tomato soup recipes call for a small amount of baking soda (often as little as half a teaspoon) to be stirred into the tomato base just before the milk is added.

- Black pepper: Brings out the robust flavors of beef. - Cumin: Provides an earthy and slightly nutty taste to beef dishes. - Oregano: Works well with ground beef and adds a Mediterranean touch. - Mustard seeds: Adds a mild tang and complements the richness of beef.

You can extract a clean, strong broth from a combination of water and several pantry ingredients. It's all about layering powerful flavor-enhancers that you probably already have on hand—bacon, tomato paste, herbs, peppercorns, a Parmesan rind, and, of course, kosher salt.

Use Herbs and Seasonings

Add chopped fresh basil or parsley at the end of cooking to bring out that rich tomato flavor. Turn to your pantry for seasonings like fresh cracked black pepper, Italian seasoning or oregano, stirring them in while the soup is still cooking.

Tomato soup is better with milk because it makes it creamier. You can add water if you have no milk or want to keep dairy-free but it will change the texture.

Spaghetti is one of the most popular pasta types to go into soup. Commonly found in Minestrone and Cream of Chicken, it's simple, can be trimmed to various lengths, and adds sustenance without taking up too much space.

When to add potatoes into soup? ›

If potatoes are an addition to the soup recipe you are using, a good rule would be to add them about 20 minutes before you want the soup to be ready. Keep in mind that the smaller the potatoes are cut, the quicker they cook.

If you're making a soup that calls for pasta, you generally only need to use approximately one-third or half of the box of dried pasta. Prepare the soup and add the dried pasta directly to it after the soup has cooked for half the time recommended in the recipe instructions.

The reason for sprinkling a pinch of sugar into a simmering saucepan of tomatoes is simple: sugar cuts the acidity of the tomatoes and creates an overall more balanced sauce. The exact acid levels in tomatoes can vary quite a bit depending on whether they're fresh or canned, the tomato variety, and the time of year.

That bitterness could be acid from the tomatoes and one way people typically fix that is by adding a small amount of sugar.

If you don't want to resort to sugar, baking soda, broth or cinnamon, you just have one thing left to do; cook the tomato as little as possible because, perhaps you can't imagine it, but the more tomato it cooks, the more sour it becomes.

Monosodium glutamate is the quickest way to get that pure hit of meaty savoriness. It doesn't add much depth, so it's especially useful in dishes where you've developed a ton of veggie-based flavor but are still missing that little meaty something.

In general, cooked meat flavor develops as a result of interactions between amino acids, peptides, reducing sugars, vitamins, and nucleotides or their breakdown products during cooking from the lean component.

The best way to ensure a flavorful soup is to brown the beef and onions in the beginning. If the soup tastes bland at the end of cooking, add more spices and herbs. After adding, allow the soup to cook a little longer so the flavors to meld together.