Storing and Reheating Soup

If you don’t have an hour to cool your soup at room temperature, you can divide the hot dish into a number of storage containers, which allows the heat to dissipate more quickly than letting the entire batch of soup cool down in the pot.

An easy way to freeze soup in convenient single servings is to set out some 10- or 12-ounce paper cups for hot beverages and fill each three-quarters of the way with cooled soup. Label, wrap well in plastic wrap, and freeze each cup.

Creamy soups and soups with a pasta component don’t freeze very well. The dairy curdles as it freezes and the pasta turns mushy. Instead, freeze the soup without the dairy or pasta. After you've thawed and reheated the soup, either stir in the uncooked pasta and simmer until just tender or stir in the dairy and heat gently.

For safety reasons, we recommend thawing frozen soups in the refrigerator, never at room temperature, for 24 to 48 hours. (That said, if you’ve forgotten to plan ahead, you can heat frozen soups or stews directly in the microwave or on the stovetop, but note that the texture of meat and vegetables might suffer slightly.)

To reheat soups, we prefer to gently simmer them on the stovetop (though a spin in the microwave works, too). To reheat on the stovetop, use a Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed saucepan with a tight-fitting lid. Unlike thin-bottomed pots, these sturdy pots conduct heat evenly and won't scorch during a long simmer. If using the microwave, avoid reheating in the same container you froze it in. Not all storage containers are microwave-safe, and the space inside the container will be too tight for you to comfortably stir the food during the heating process. Instead, we recommend transferring the food to a microwave-safe dish that’s somewhat larger than the storage container. Just be sure to cover the dish to prevent a mess in your microwave.