Martha Stewart Uses a Surprising Ingredient to Thicken Soup, and It’s Probably in Your Pantry

When the days are super short, and the air is super cold, there’s nothing better than comforting soup and perhaps some warm crusty bread to soak it up. A bowl of piping hot soup that fills you up and satisfies your hunger is best—and thicker soups seem to be more filling, don’t they? 

Soups such as ham and split pea soup, broccoli and Cheddar soup, or creamy mushroom soup get their thickness from starch in the beans, melty cheese, or half and half, but you can make any soup thicker without altering its taste with one food that most of us already have in our pantries.

In a recent Instagram video, Martha Stewart—the queen of kitchen tips and tricks—shows us how.

How to Thicken Soup with Rolled Oats

Open your pantry, and there’s a good possibility that a canister of rolled oats is in there. You probably have it stocked for making stovetop oatmeal, overnight oats, or oatmeal raisin cookies, but most likely you didn't intend to use it in soup—until now.

In the Instagram video, Martha follows all the usual steps to make a quick creamy broccoli soup. She sautés onion, adds seasoning, pours in chicken broth, and simmers the broccoli in the broth—but then in a surprising twist, she adds rolled oats. 

When everything is cooked through, she purées the soup in a blender, and the oats act as a thickener in the soup, creating a creamy texture without using any cream. 

“When you want to make soup but don’t have a lot of time, this is the recipe you need,” she writes in the caption. “It takes less than 30 minutes to make and it has a delicious creamy texture, yet is dairy-free. Pureeing broccoli and chicken broth with a small amount of oats thickens the soup and creates the luscious texture we crave, without adding any heavy cream.”

Can You Still Thicken Soup with Oats If You’re Not Puréeing It?

No one wants visible oats floating around in their soup, so you might be wondering if you can still use oats to thicken soup if you're not puréeing it at the end.

We're happy to say you can use oats to thicken almost any soup if you use oat flour (or a food processor to grind up rolled oats or quick-cooking oats). Use about 1/3 cup of oats (before grinding) for each quart of liquid in the soup. You can also use oats to thicken stews such as vegetable beef stew or chicken thigh and dumpling stew if they turn out thinner than you’d like.