How To Turn Soup Into An Irresistibly Creamy Dip With Just One Extra Ingredient

Night after night, coming up with new dinner ideas can be monotonous and, honestly, difficult. If you're like me, eating the same meals and leftovers time and time again can get very dull very quickly. Luckily, there are ways to transform your leftovers into new, dynamic dishes that will bring excitement to the 5 p.m. dinner cravings — even with the simplest-seeming leftovers. Soups are one leftover that can be modified tremendously. By adding cheese to the soup of your choosing, you'll now have a delicious, dense dip.

While there are many online recipes turning various types of soups into dips, they each have one thing in common: cheese. Several recipes integrate both cream cheese and shredded cheese into soups to thicken the consistency, making them ideal for dipping. These cheeses, already dense in nature, coagulate the broth and fillings, yet starting out with an already-thick-and-creamy soup is more effective because a soup with thin broth does not hold together as well. Yet it's important to use softened cream cheese, as a cold cream cheese will not blend or melt as seamlessly. Baking the mixture until melted and gluey seems to be the internet's preferred cooking method for the perfect soup-dip.

Peak soup season is upon us as colder weather approaches, giving you the perfect excuse to make this soup-to-dip wonder. Both canned soups and homemade soups will do the trick, especially those that are already creamy in nature. Some online chefs even rummage through their pantries to add other zesty ingredients into their soup-dips, giving an endless array of choices for your creation.

Any creamy soup could be transformed into a dip, yet there are some creamier soups that are more desirable soup-dips than others. The internet praises soups with beans to create a thick enough consistency suitable for the perfect dip. Bean dips are some of the tastiest in the dips category, so naturally, a bean-soup dip may reign supreme. One TikTok user transforms a steak-and-beans canned soup to make a steakhouse soup-dip. With the canned soup as a base, the user combines softened cream cheese, shredded cheese, and various sauces and spices to create the delicacy. Another TikTok user transforms a classic chicken tortilla soup into a delightful dip, yet again using softened cream cheese and shredded cheese to thicken the base. Softening cream cheese can be timely if done properly, but it is nevertheless essential for any soup-dip recipe.

Soups that already have cheese in them make for good soup-dips as well. French onion soup, a classic, can transform into a creamy and delectable dip with — you guessed it — a slathering of softened cream cheese and shredded cheese. One online chef includes sour cream into the mix as well, presumably to thicken the mixture since a traditional French onion can be relatively thin.

Soup-dips can mimic more recipes than the soups they're used with — say grilled cheese with tomato, for example. While many enjoy dipping a standard grilled cheese in tomato soup, this soup-dip combines all of those mouthwatering flavors into one. By adding creamy tomato soup, softened cream cheese, and shredded cheese, you get the ever-pleasing sandwich in dip form. What's wonderful about the soup-dips is that they can be further enhanced with any pantry items of your choosing. You can add bacon to the grilled cheese tomato soup-dip, artichoke to a creamy bean soup-dip, or any and all spices and sauces your heart desires.