My 1-Ingredient Upgrade for Better Soup (It Works Every Time)

It’s a weekend and you’re doing some leisurely cooking to get ready for the upcoming week. A big pot of soup is on. You chopped, you sautéed, you simmered. You’re getting hungry. Finally, the soup is ready, its aroma filling the house. Then you taste it and it’s… boring. It's missing something.

I’m a big soup-maker, and this happens to me enough that I keep a mental Rolodex of soup fixes at hand. Who should settle for mediocre soup? No me, and certainly not you.

A few years ago I added an awesome flavor booster to my soup repertoire. I love it because it’s so unexpected, and it’s something I always have on hand. You probably do, too!

A “New” Trick That’s Actually Hundreds of Years Old

Pickle brine has been having an extended moment in recent years. People use it to punch up salad dressings, chicken wings, and even lemonade. Turns out, it’s also a magnificent addition to soup. 

Salty pickle brine works like a bouillon cube of sorts, but way better. Adding about a cup (depending on the recipe) brings the soup alive, building depth and pushing flavor from meh to wow.

I came across this trick in Olia Hercules’ cookbook Summer Kitchens. It’s a collection of mostly Ukrainian recipes that utilize homegrown fruits and vegetables, many of them in ferments and preserves. She offers a recipe for a brothy vegetable soup that I rapidly fell in love with.

Where it departs from other soups is the inclusion of chopped fermented pickles and their brine. Chopped pickles are surprisingly at home in soup, but it’s the brine that brings it to life. It adds dimension and an intriguing sprightliness.

Pickle soups are totally a thing in Eastern Europe. There’s a Polish pickle soup called zupa ogórkowa, which is creamy. When you come across a recipe calling itself “dill pickle soup,” it’s probably this one. It’s made with vinegar pickle brine, not from fermented pickles, so it’s a little more bracing, but the creaminess tempers the tang.

Pickle juice is also commonly a part of the Russian soup rassolnik, a barley soup with vegetables, meat, and grated gherkins plus their brine. 

 How To Use Pickle Brine in Soup

While actual pickle pieces in soup are great when you want them, the frugal technique of adding a generous pour of pickle brine can up your soup game in all sorts of recipes, without the potentially polarizing pickles themselves. In fact, you wouldn’t think pickles! when you taste the soup, but you’ll know there’s something different and special about it.

Here are my tips for using pickle brine in soup:

• First off, know the difference between fermented pickle brine and vinegar pickle brine. They’re quite different, so you have to deploy them accordingly. The pickle brine I use most in soups is from fermented pickles, also known as lacto-fermented pickles—the kind from the refrigerated section in the grocery store. It’s cleaner-tasting and not sour. 
• The pickles that most Americans are familiar with are vinegar pickles, the ones that are shelf-stable until you open the jar. You can use that brine in soup, too, but because of the vinegar, it’ll make the soup somewhat sour. In most soups you’d want to use it more conservatively.
• When adding fermented pickle brine to soups, I find the soup often benefits from a little splash of vinegar added at the end, too.
• I like to add the pickle brine close to the end of cooking, which I think imparts a certain freshness and preserves the dill flavor (if there was any dill used in the pickle to begin with).
• Pickle brine is salty. Season the soup with a light hand, add the pickle brine, then taste the soup and adjust the seasoning with more salt if you think it needs it.
• What soups benefit from pickle brine? Try it in potato soup, minestrone, borscht, or mushroom barley soup.