Your Favorite Soup Needs A Splash Of Leftover Pickle Juice

Pickles are perfection, full stop. After polishing off a jar of premium-made pickles, you might find yourself wondering how to make the most out of the pickle juice left lingering behind. The answer is soup. Yes, adding a splash of pickle juice to your favorite soups will elevate the flavor to even more enjoyable heights, making pickles – and pickle juice – the gifts that keep on giving.

Leftover pickle juice has a myriad of creative uses and nutritious benefits. For one, drinking pickle juice can be good for you as a tangy and hydrating electrolyte-rich beverage. When used as a flavor additive, pickle juice has the right punch of tanginess to liven up the soup of your choosing with a bright, briny flavor. Looking at soups with strong sour and savory notes, you're sure to find a place for your pickle juice to shine. Because pickles can be prepared a number of ways, this also allows you to find the right pickle to match the style of soup you're pairing it with.

"Soup up" your soup with a dash, splash, or heaping ladleful of pickle juice depending on how much soup you're working with and just how much you love pickles. If you're making an actual pickle soup, then pickle juice is certainly a necessity. When experimenting with other soups, broth-based is a great place to start with adding pickle juice into the mix. A good rule of thumb is to proceed slowly and taste as you go, beginning with swapping a quarter to an eighth of your broth with pickle juice. Savory cream-based soups such as clam or potato chowder would also work well as the creaminess of the soup and the boldness of pickle juice would complement one another.

Additionally, pickle juice is a great addition to spring vegetable soups because of its sour and salt content. It would work especially well in a variety of cold soups too, Spanish gazpacho in particular, because of the interplay of acidic notes among the tomatoes and pickle juice. Adding pickle juice to any variety of borscht makes an excellent pairing as pickles and the art of pickling are a staple of Eastern European cuisine. Taking the magical additive of pickle juice and playing around with it in your favorite dishes is just one more fantastic way to enjoy pickles, and who doesn't love that?