The 5 Soups Ina Garten Loves To Make Ahead And Freeze

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The winter cold may be firmly in the rearview mirror for some of us, but a big bowl of warm soup is comforting all year round. And nobody knows that more than beloved food personality Ina Garten. The Barefoot Contessa is a big proponent of serving soups, so much so that she and her husband Jeffrey never skip soup and have it for lunch every day. That said, few people want to tend to a long-simmering pot of soup, and neither does it make sense to make a small amount of soup at a time. Garten's suggestion? Make ahead and freeze.

Freezing soups is relatively easy. However, defrosting a giant block of soup will take ages, so dividing the soup into one cup portions using meal prep silicone cubes like these Souper Cubes is a big time-saver. You can also use normal freezer bags; just use smaller sizes, and freeze them flat. Once they have frozen, you can stand them up on their sides like a soup filing cabinet in your freezer. According to Garten, frozen soups last for up to six months in the freezer, though if you go by guidelines outlined on FoodSafety.gov, you should start being cautious with consuming frozen soups after the three-month mark.

So which soups from her extensive recipe catalog are Garten's favorites for making ahead? Read on for our versions of her top five recommended soup recipes for freezing, along with tips on how to prepare them for optimal storing and defrosting.

If you want to serve soup as the main event of the meal, Ina Garten recommends a soup with textural variety to keep it interesting and satisfying. That said, starchy elements like cooked pasta and potatoes do not tend to freeze very well, as their texture often becomes compromised when defrosted. Thankfully, the fix is easy, and we will explain how to do that with this very first soup recipe: minestrone.

In our minestrone soup recipe, we call for the usual combination of celery, carrots, and onions, along with canned tomatoes. We also use kale as the leafy vegetable, and canned kidney beans. These elements freeze relatively well, as kale is an especially hardy leafy green, so with our recipe, you can make the whole recipe and freeze it complete. If you are making it more like Garten's "winter minestrone" version, swap the kidney beans for cannellini beans. Then, make the soup up until the point the beans are added, but hold the kale. Once the beans are in, turn off the heat and cool it to room temperature before freezing. 

When preparing it for eating, reheat the soup until simmering, then add cooked pasta (Garten uses tubetti), and instead of kale, stir through fresh baby spinach leaves until wilted. Add a splash of dry white wine and a spoonful of store-bought pesto, then it is pretty much ready. Serve it with some garlic bruschetta and you have a meal fit for the Garten lunch table.

What if you want a bit of a meaty soup? Enter: Italian wedding soup. While this classic favorite did not always have meatballs, nor was it named for wedding ceremonies, it does have roots in the marriage of meat and hearty greens. Mashed has a quick and filling recipe for Italian wedding soup that comes together in 30 minutes in an Instant Pot, and even a spicy variety using meatballs made from hot Italian sausages. 

You can use either of the Mashed recipes as a starting point, but to make it like Ina Garten, the major difference lies in the meatballs themselves. While our recipes use beef or pork, Garten's uses a combination of ground chicken and chicken sausage with the casings removed. She then mixes them with breadcrumbs, grated cheese, and an egg, then shapes them into meatballs before baking them in the oven for about 30 minutes. This adds a rich and rounded flavor to the soup, compared to cooking raw meatballs directly in the broth.

To make this soup ahead, bake the meatballs on their own like Garten does, and prepare the vegetable soup. Cool both components to room temperature, then freeze separately. When reheating, warm the soup first, then add the defrosted meatballs along with cooked pasta to warm through. Make like Garten as well, and add baby spinach leaves at the end of reheating until wilted.

Everyone loves a good chicken noodle soup. It is easy to put together, extremely comforting, and can be customized in a whole variety of ways to make it restaurant-worthy. Ina Garten's chicken noodle soup takes it in the direction of East Asian flavors, using Asian greens like bok choy, and adding ramen instead of the usual pasta shapes or noodles. It is much like Mashed's easy Chinese chicken and noodle soup recipe – think of your instant ramen days in college, but much more luxurious and filling.

As is a theme with Garten's recipes, there is an extra step that involves elevating at least one of the elements. Instead of using shredded pre-cooked chicken like our recipe does, she instructs you to roast skin-on, bone-in chicken breasts specifically for this soup. However, for seasoning, she keeps it to just soy sauce, though you can make it like ours and add the oyster sauce and Shaoxing wine as well for extra flavor. For making ahead or freezing, Garten recommends making the soup up until the point you add the ramen, bok choy, and scallions. Cool the soup, then portion and freeze as usual. When reheating, add those remaining ingredients to cook through (and wilt, in the case of the greens), and serve immediately.

Pasta e fagioli is a beloved comfort dish, and is exactly what its name describes: pasta and beans. With its roots as a peasant dish or "cucina povera", pasta e fagioli makes the most of its humble ingredients. Mashed's recipe for pasta e fagioli calls for three different kinds of canned beans, namely cannellini, Northern, and garbanzo. Canned beans help greatly in reducing the time needed to prepare this soup, but Ina Garten's recipe takes a different route of "store-bought is just fine". She calls for, well, store-bought dried 16 bean soup mix which is soaked overnight before being simmered for an hour on the stove. You can use a bean soup mix such as this Goya brand, though we suspect that any bean soup mix would do just as well.

When it comes to thickening the soup, many recipes (including the Mashed recipe) call for using a food processor or a blender to process part of the soup until smooth. This flavorful bean puree is then added back to the rest of the soup. Garten's recipe opts for a food mill instead. This gives the soup a chunkier texture while helping separate the skins from the beans.

While the Mashed recipe is loaded with both firm and leafy vegetables, Garten's version strips it down to really focus on the pasta and the beans. She does however garnish hers with julienned basil at the end for a herby pop of flavor, making the soup extremely moreish. 

Creamy soups can be one of the simplest yet most luxurious to prepare. With a combination of a starchy base and dairy (or dairy substitute), you have the foundation for a comforting meal. Potato soups in particular can be quite filling, and Mashed's chunky potato leek soup recipe hits all the right spots. It calls for baking potatoes and heavy cream, flavored with vegetable stock and plenty of aromatics by way of onions, leeks, and garlic. You then blend up to half the soup before adding it back in, resulting in a deliciously creamy soup that you could almost chew.

There are plenty of ways to upgrade your potato soup, and we recommend looking to the Barefoot Contessa this time as well. To make this soup more Ina Garten-esque, the first swap you need to make is to use thinly sliced fennel bulbs instead of leek. She also calls for starchy Yukon Gold potatoes, and chicken stock instead of vegetable stock for more body. When it comes to blending the soup, she purées the whole pot (in batches, of course) to achieve the smoothest texture possible. Stir in a splash of Pernod and use a cup of half-and-half instead of heavy cream, heat it through, and the soup is ready for serving. Garten leans into making the soup heavy, by using croutons, goat cheese, and cooked bacon or pancetta as garnish. Almost like the classiest jacket potato you have ever had, but in sippable form!