How To Easily Fix Your Soup When It Tastes A Little Sour

Simple, comforting, and endlessly versatile, soup is a meal that everyone should have a back-pocket recipe for. Balancing soup flavors can be tricky, however, and sometimes your dish ends up tasting a little sour, especially if you use canned tomatoes, which can taste more acidic than fresh. Fortunately, Jem Mantiri, the vegan recipe developer, food blogger, and photographer behind The Fruity Jem, has a simple and effective solution: baking soda. "Adding just a little can neutralize acidity, giving the soup a smoother and less sharp taste," she told The Takeout.

Many experienced home cooks know that baking soda is a pretty powerful all-round ingredient. It gives cakes and bread their fluffy lift, can help tenderize meat in a marinade, and is a handy cleaning agent – but it's a great addition to soups, too.

When added to sour tomato-based soups and sauces, baking soda neutralizes the acid content and raises the pH. This leads to a reduction in sharp, off-putting flavors, and creates a better-balanced dish.

To save a sour tomato-based broth, Jem Mantiri shared some helpful tips for the best results. "Start with ¼ teaspoon of baking soda per quart of soup," she suggested. Stir it in towards the end of the cooking time, but make sure that you taste your soup before adding any more than this. "Remember that you can always add more baking soda if needed, but you cannot reverse adding too much," warned Mantiri. Putting too much baking soda in your soup can give it an unpleasant soapy flavor or even make it bitter. But, as long as you're careful, Mantiri believes there's no reason this trick can't salvage any type of soup that has too much acidity.

It's also important to remember that adding baking soda is a rescue remedy for soup that's already cooked, but there are several great tricks for reducing acidity and bringing out sweet flavors while you're preparing your soup. One great way to do this is to sprinkle tomatoes with brown sugar and roast them before blending them for your soup. You can also stir some sugar into your vegetable mix along with your other seasonings. Or, if you don't want to add sugar, swapping out cream for coconut milk or adding a tablespoon of butter can give soups a subtle, natural sweetness.

You can also sweeten soups through your choice of vegetables, and by softening them thoroughly before adding liquid. For example, chopped carrots are an important pillar of a three-ingredient mirepoix base and, when properly cooked, the sugars in carrots bring a sweet, earthy taste to your soup.