The Cucumber Trick To Erase That Burnt Taste From Your Soup

Making a soup with the odds and ends left at the bottom of the crisper drawer is a frugal move. But the one thing that can wreck your food-saving ambitions? Getting too cocky and leaving your soup on the burner for too long, as a burnt soup pervaded by an acrid odor and bitter flavor is one of the hardest foods to rescue. Luckily, if you act quickly, you can bring your soup back from the brink with one breezy cucumber trick. According to People, Fabrizio Schenardi, executive chef of Four Seasons Resort Orlando, places a cucumber in his soup to effortlessly erase that burnt taste.

To get started, decant your soup into a new pot if it has scorched the base of your pan (don't scrape the bottom or you'll simply transfer the burnt flavor along with you). Then wrap a cucumber in cheesecloth (or any cloth you don't mind getting dirty) and crush it with the back of a knife to split open some of its flesh. Remove your cuke from the cloth and put it into your soup for 15 minutes to allow it to absorb any burnt flavor; it should soak it up like a sponge. Finally, once your cucumber has done its job, you can discard it and put your soup back onto a simmer.

Give your rescued soup a quick taste to check if all the burnt flavor has been eliminated before adjusting your seasonings. If your soup still has a charred note to it, or you don't have a cucumber on hand, consider salvaging burnt soup with a dash of sweetener, like honey or sugar. These ingredients counteract the sharp notes in the soup and mellow it out. Another idea is to add more of the main ingredients, such as chopped tomatoes or cream, to dilute the burnt taste.

If you've ever made homemade dill pickles you'll already know that cukes are the perfect little vehicles for soaking up the flavor of any liquid they're steeped in. Similar to the way chopped potatoes can remedy an over salted soup, cucumbers readily slurp up flavors and aromas through a process called osmosis. Bashing the surface of the cucumber before placing it in your soup exposes more of its flesh to the liquid, which allows it to absorb all those unwanted scorched odors at a faster rate. The flavor of cucumber is relatively mild (it's made of 96% water) so it's unlikely it will negatively affect the flavor of your soup. Moreover, it doesn't contain starch, like potatoes, so it won't thicken up your dish either. As you're using an entire cucumber, instead of slicing it up into chunks, it's also straightforward to remove and discard.