Add This Leftover Liquid To Your Potato Soup For An Effortless Flavor Burst

Baked potato soup is cozy, soul-warming, and offers the perfect canvas for bacon, chives, sour cream, and cheddar cheese — the list is endless. Topping your potato soup isn't the only way to ramp up the flavor, however. Adding a secret ingredient — a bit of bacon grease — to the soup itself adds rich, savory notes that pair perfectly with starchy potatoes. We already know bacon tastes good with literally everything, and potato soup is no exception. Tip: Frozen hash browns are the secret to cut down on the time it takes you from starting your recipe to enjoying a hot bowl of potato soup. 

A little goes a long way when it comes to adding bacon grease to your potato soup, so you'll want to take it easy and taste as you go. Bacon grease is super-salty, so add just a bit at a time to help ensure you don't overdo it. While only adding bacon grease at the end of your cooking process is one (effective) way to do it, adding bacon fat to your soup at the beginning can add deep layers of flavor. A word to the wise: While adding bacon flavor to your soup is key, you might want to only use bacon as a topping for the soup, rather than mixing pieces into the soup itself. When bacon sits in liquid for an extended period of time, it loses the crispiness that creates such a delicious contrast to the soup itself.

While adding bacon grease to the broth of your soup is a great way to add a burst of salty, savory umami, you can take it a step further. After you cook up the bacon you're going to use to top your baked potato soup (pro tip: Use this pantry staple to make your bacon even crispier), toss the veggies your recipe calls for into the bacon grease to soften them up before you add them to your broth. Let your potato chunks cook in the bacon grease as well — this gives the outside of your potatoes a nice texture while the grease infuses more flavor, as potatoes are great at soaking up the bacon-flavored saltiness. 

Potato soup tends to go quickly (especially if you're serving it with a ton of savory toppings), so you might want to make a big batch — and storing it correctly is key for easily heating up and enjoying soup in the days to come. Bacon fat solidifies in the fridge, so it's a good idea to store leftover soup in individually sized containers. This allows you to get some of the bacon-y flavor in each container (where the flavors will deepen as it sits), without having to scrape a bit of solidified fat out of the container (or heat up the entire thing) each time you want to enjoy a bowl of soup.