Everything You Need for the Best Soup Prep This Winter

Let me tell you why “soup prep” should be replacing “meal prep” in your vocabulary this winter.

Meal prep and I have not gotten along in the past. I'd spend Sundays in the kitchen with the best intentions of sorting out my lunches for the week, whether it was with a big beautiful vat of black bean soup, a gluten-free chicken noodle soup, or a spicy turkey chili. But by Wednesday, I'd be hitting takeout for lunch again. The lovingly crafted soup would be left to slowly spoil in my fridge, because nothing tastes good the fourth day in a row. As we got into this year's soup season, I knew I'd have to prioritize variety. It all clicked into place once I started doling out individual servings into Souper Cubes freezer trays. These silicon molds separate, freeze and organize any batched meal you can fit into them. Now my freezer is a treasure chest full of single serving sized frozen blocks of noodle soups, bean soups, and beef stews. I actually look forward to my weekly meal prep knowing I'm not sentencing myself to the same soup every single day. I'm simply adding more variety into my well stocked freezer, so I can pick whichever soup or stew I'm in the mood for each lunch. But the better freezer organization was just the start of my soup-maxing season. Here's all the tools I use to make my freezer full of soups the hottest (coldest?) restaurant in town.

Easily Organized Freezer Storage

Nothing turns the glee of a well-stocked freezer into the dread of leftovers like a gallon sized frost-bitten brick of soup. I've tried to solve this by freezing smaller portions with the mish-mash of smaller food containers in my house, but it's hard to keep organized, and my stash of pint sized deli containers run out pretty quickly when they're all filled and confined to long term storage in the freezer.

What I like about Souper Cubes is that their trays stack neatly in the freezer, and then once all the individual servings are solid, I can pop them out into these reusable food storage bags from W&P. So now my freezer has a bag full of beef stew blocks, and another bag full of chicken stock cubes, another with single servings of Spicy Pork and Mustard Green Soup. The emptied Souper Cube trays are ready for whatever my next batch of freezer friendly meals are. The food grade silicone can be filled up hot or cold, keeps weird smells at bay, and is microwave and dishwasher safe.

A Pressure Cooker/Slow Cooker Combo

I give my pressure cooker a lot of credit for improving the quality of my kitchen life. A pressure cooker not only cooks stews and braises faster on my meal prep day; I also rely on it for making my own stock, which I find to be tastier, more nutritious and cheaper than store bought chicken broth in any soup recipe. But a pressure cooker can be a little intimidating, which is why I like the cheerful looking and user friendly Our Place Dream Cooker. The control panel is intuitive, and its attractive design makes for a device I don't mind keeping out on the countertop (which means I actually use it, instead of forgetting it exists in the back of a cupboard.) Bonus: It can sear, saute, slow cook and keep food warm.

A Food Processor With Stamina

Meal prep means a whole lot of veggies to chop, and that is why I say, “Hand this one over to the robots.” The Breville Sous Chef 12-Cup Food Processor has a 1,000-watt motor and can fit up to 12 cups of whatever you'd like diced, grated, or pureed. And it doesn't even cry when I make it dice my onions. If you want to save a little money and don't quite need that kind of horsepower, we recommend the 12-cup Hamilton Beach Big Mouth Duo as a budget-friendly option.

A Stove-To-Oven Pot

If you haven't been blessed with a vintage (née “ancient”) Dutch oven from a family elder, you're going to want a quality stove-to-oven pot. We're split on a preference between Staub or Le Creuset, (I will weigh in to say my Le Creuset has served me faithfully for nearly a decade) but either way, these pots will quickly become your favorite all purpose kitchen workhorse, capable of anything you need from on top of the oven or inside of the stove, with plenty of room for many soup servings.

A No-Nonsense Blender

For silky soups and creamy purees, nothing beats a Vitamix. And yes, I'm talking about cold weather cooking today, but I would be remiss not to shout out my Vitamix for cranking out perfect piña coladas in the summer time.

But I typically don't want to carefully tip a steaming pot of hot and chunky lava directly into the countertop blender's carafe. So I often just dunk an immersion blender right into a pot of softened veggies and carbohydrates and transform them into luscious liquid like a magical wand (whose only spells are “emulsion” and “puree,” but still—pretty magical).

Spices and Condiments

Whether it's for a Mexican tortilla soup recipe or Italian ribolitta, if you can't remember when you last stocked the spices in your pantry, you might as well be seasoning with sawdust. Treat yourself to some vibrant fresh spices from Burlap & Barrel and see for yourself how much their powdered purple stripe garlic and dried flowering hyssop thyme can invigorate the aromas in your meal prep headquarters.

An Anti-fatigue Mat

If you scoff at our suggestion to let a food processor chop your onions or allow a slow cooker to do the work while you're not home, then please let us recommend some relief for your feet with an anti-fatigue mat. A meal prep day spent standing in the kitchen does not need to mean a night of charley horses. I am so grateful for my squishy ergonomic mat when I'm slicing and stirring on my feet for hours.