Thicken Your Soup With A Dollop Of Mayo For A Creamy Bite

A lovingly made soup may still refuse to thicken, even if it's left to simmer all day on the stove. Perhaps you consider adding yogurt, one of the many easy ways to thicken your soup. Alas, you've run out of yogurt, but you do have mayonnaise on hand. After stirring a dollop of mayo into the soup, you find that it adds just the perfect amount of body and bite, with a hint of creaminess. It's almost too easy!

Mayonnaise is an underrated ingredient. Other than providing a deliciously creamy sandwich filling, it has myriad other uses in the kitchen, from adding umami crisp to grilled cheese sandwiches to keeping grilled meats moist. It even appears in some cake recipes to amp up the moisture there, too.

All this may sound a little weird until you remember that the main ingredients of mayo are oil, eggs, and an acid like lemon juice. Taken separately, these ingredients aren't out of place in many recipes, whether savory or sweet. It often makes sense to just add one ingredient instead of several, too. But how does mayo specifically work to thicken soups?

Mayonnaise is an emulsion, also known as a mixture of water and fat, two things that don't usually get along. The oil and vinegar in mayo are held together by egg yolks, creating a stable concoction. Commercial versions of mayo generally contain a few more stabilizers to make it even more shelf-stable. This makes it perfect to thicken a variety of soups

It's difficult to emulsify large amounts of water in soup, but when you add an already-emulsified component (like mayo), it encourages the other ingredients to emulsify as well. 

In the case of a soup, you're not looking for a strong emulsion — you'd be slurping a creamy paste! — but a weak one that's enough to smooth out the mouthfeel. So long as you're not looking to make a clear broth, this technique is especially useful for meals that naturally have a little more fat, like chicken soup. Instead of straining the fat out, emulsify it into the soup and make it satisfyingly lip-smacking.

When it comes to adding mayonnaise to soups, you can simply add it to the pot on the stove or in a bowl at the table, so long as you thoroughly stir it in. Experiment with ratios and try swapping cream with mayo when making cream-of-anything soups. Lactose-intolerant folks can rejoice, too, as this can give you a similarly-textured end product and keep tummy rumbles at bay.

Speaking of lactose, dairy products are also often emulsified. But store-bought mayo has yet another major benefit in that it is much more shelf-stable. This means that, with mayo, you don't have to open a new carton of dairy for the purpose of thickening a soup and worry about using the rest up in time. Instead, you can just reach for the jar of mayo in the fridge, which is practically always ready for your next culinary adventure.