How To Thicken Soup

I'm going to show you how to thicken soup today. I've got what is quite a watery cauliflower soup here, and that was just made by frying off some onion and garlic, some cauliflower florets, covering it with stock, bringing it up to the boil, cooking the cauliflower and blitzing it up. The basic template for a soup - you can put whatever veggie you like in here.

Now, this pan is already very hot, just so that we can hit the ground running. Okay, that butter's melting away nicely. If I just show you a quick close up of that, you can see the butter, and I'm going to put about a teaspoonful of flour in there now.

Just give it a good old whisk together. What we're going to get is a sort of thickening paste; I could maybe just cook that down a little bit more. But this is really what's going to thicken the soup out.

I'm just going to be a little bit more gung-ho and add a little bit more flour. But that should be more than enough. We've got a reasonably thick - I mean, you can get it very thick, but I've just gone for something that's just going to thicken it out.

There we go. That's actually, funnily enough, the perfect roux. So now that we've got our roux, what we can do is we can add our very watery soup to that.

And if you just combine the two, it won't thicken out immediately, but what I will do is start to just cook that roux and the soup through together, and already, you can see the texture has gone from being quite watery. It's already thickened out a little bit more. If you come back in about thirty seconds' time, that will really have thickened down nicely.

So, just to demonstrate the texture, if we look at the back of the spoon, it's still quite watery, and if I pour that in here, I'm hoping that you can see that it's quite, sort of, insipid and thin. Whereas if we now take the soup that we thickened out, look, it coats the back of the spoon nicely and as you can see, the texture has completely changed, so it's much thicker now. And that is the perfect way to thicken soup. .