These six mistakes will ruin any soup: many housewives make them

Soup is one of the simplest everyday meals. But very often, it is with this meal that many housewives have problems. This is because it is not enough to simply put all the ingredients in a pot and cook them. The dish requires special technology.

The FoodOboz editorial team will tell you about the most common mistakes made when cooking various soups. These are the actions that make your dish tasteless and unattractive.

Soup is cooked too fast

The soup should not boil too much. The dish needs time to make the broth rich and flavorful. Slow cooking brings out the flavor of the individual ingredients, mainly meat and vegetables. Too fast cooking prevents this from happening, the broth loses its color, and becomes cloudy and unappetizing. It is also worth removing the scale that appears at the beginning of cooking from the surface of the soup. This will make the soup clear and very tasty.

Wrong spices

It happens that a soup tastes too salty or bitter, and we don't know at what stage we made a mistake. Food is not always too salty because too much salt is added. It turns out that sometimes we simply forget that we have added ingredients to the soup that are salty in themselves. For example, pickled cucumbers or tomato paste.

The bitter taste of the soup can be caused by pepper or dried herbs added too early. The general rule of thumb is that soups should be seasoned at the end of cooking, and it is better to use fresh herbs instead of dried ones.

Vegetables that are too hard

Hard potatoes and other vegetables are a problem in sour soups with cucumbers or sauerkraut, or sorrel. The acid contained in the main products effectively inhibits the cooking process of other vegetables, so they remain hard. To avoid this problem, add acidic ingredients only after the other ingredients have been cooked to the desired softness.

Unevenly cooked ingredients

When cooking a soup, it's not enough to throw in all the ingredients, bring it to a boil, reduce the heat, and wait for it to cook by itself. You need to keep your finger on the pulse while cooking. This is because different foods cook at different speeds.

Put the ingredients that take the longest to cook into the soup first. Therefore, meat should go into the pot first, followed by vegetables, such as carrots, parsley, or celery. A few minutes before the end of cooking, you can add potatoes or rice, and 10 minutes before the end – vegetables that cook quickly. For example, cauliflower or broccoli. You can also add pasta at this point.

Overcooked ingredients

Cooking ingredients for too long makes the soup not only visually unattractive but also not very tasty. Overcooked vegetables, pasta, or rice even disintegrate in the water, changing the consistency of the dish and losing many nutrients.

Using store-bought stock cubes

For cooking soups, it is best to use homemade broth made from fresh ingredients. Purchased bouillon cubes can significantly speed up the soup preparation process, but they are not healthy products. They contain a lot of salt and preservatives. This can be harmful to the body.