Supermarket tomato soup will taste so much better by adding 1 cheap ingredient at the end

There’s nothing better than a steaming bowl of comforting soup to warm the cockles of the soul on a chilly winter’s day. Whether you’re making soup from scratch or picking up a can for a quick and convenient meal on your way home from work, soup is a  classic winter staple. 

However, a food expert from Simply Recipes shared how you can instantly upgrade a bland and boring shop-bought soup with the help of one very common ingredient. When her purse strings were tight, Simply Recipe’s Molly Adams relied on shop-bought soup as a staple meal. However, when at culinary school, she learned about a sauce technique that was “transformative”, using butter to intensify the flavour.

Molly wrote: "During one transformative lesson about French mother sauces, I learned a technique known as monter au beurre, or ‘to mount with butter.’

"When making certain sauces, like a basic pan gravy, a velouté, or even beurre blanc, you finish them with a little butter.

"Something as simple as adding a few cold pats of butter can totally transform the mouthfeel and flavour of a sauce. That day, it clicked: you can do the exact same thing with tomato soup."

When heating up the soup, Molly gently swirled two tablespoons of cold, cubed butter into a quart of tomato soup (roughly 945ml). Instead of stirring the butter in, the expert recommended moving the saucepan gently by its handle to incorporate.

Swirl the saucepan until the butter has fully melted and blended in.

Molly continued: "I was blown away by how much the butter improved the flavour of the soup.

"The tomatoes’ acidity was slightly muted, and the soup became much creamier, almost as if I’d swirled in a bit of heavy cream—an ingredient that was most certainly not in my grocery budget.

"All these years later, I still love this soup, and I always add butter to it. My kids love it, too. (It even helps cool the temperature down for them!)"