The Ultimate Guide to Perfectly Cheesy Soup

Editor’s note: January is National Soup Month but really, we love cheesy soups all year round!

Michele Di Pietro is an expert at discerning which cheese works best in your soup. With a degree from the Restaurant School in Philadelphia and experience in research and development at Whole Foods, Di Pietro has cooked her way through hundreds of pounds of cheese. For January, which is National Soup Month, she’s sharing her best tips to produce flawlessly cheesy soups, from using the proper reheating temperature, to the optimal cheeses for blending into or garnishing the soup.

When the pandemic started, the chef and culinary consultant was isolated in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. Di Pietro decided this period of isolation was the perfect time to finish her passion project, a soup cookbook called “SOUPified: Soups Inspired by Your Favorite Dishes.” The hearty, comforting cookbook features soup versions of classic dishes like Eggplant Parm, Chicken Marsala, Lasagna, Shrimp Scampi, Philly Cheesesteak, Clams Casino, and Chinese Egg Roll. Luckily for cheese lovers, many of these recipes naturally require cheese, as well as the perfect techniques for incorporating it.

Di Pietro, who hails from a Sicilian and Abruzzese family, knew that cheese would be vital to both constitute and finish many of her soups. In fact, 18 of the 31 recipes in her book contain cheese, either cooked into the soup or as a garnish.

How did the idea of SOUPified actually come about?

Michele DiPietro (MDP): The ideas for SOUPified were things I had for a long time. SOUPified soups are inspired by your favorite dishes -- dishes that are classic, that already exist. With Mangia with Michele, I write recipes for classic Italian-American and regional dishes that are more often than not something a little different from the original, and presented in a very unusual way -- for example, puttanesca-flavored breadcrumbs on top of vegetables, or avocado carbonara. SOUPified takes classic dishes like chicken marsala and turns them into soup. Well, in April I was living in a one-bedroom in Manhattan, and things were not great outdoors. I decided I needed to kick into gear.

What made you want to do a cookbook of soups inspired by classic dishes, so many of which include cheese?

MDP: My inspiration for the book comes from so many different factors, including a strong presence of growing up Italian-American. As a five-year-old, I was standing by my mom, learning how to cook eggs, and making pasta with my grandma from a very young age. I like variety and really love food. I’ve also been at the front end of menu and recipe development, and it’s been my job and profession to continually come up with new ideas.

Why do you include cheese in so many of your recipes?

MDP: They’re both the ultimate comfort foods. Soup is the ultimate comfort food and I think bread and cheese are another ultimate comfort food, a desert island food. Why not combine two great things and make something else much better? Also, just to add onto that, there are so many different directions you can take with soup and cheese. Okay, not all, but so many cheeses would work in soups.

What are your favorite soup recipes in the book with cheese?

Spinach Quiche Soup, Photo credits to Michele Di Pietro

MDP: The Chicken Burrito soup, Spinach Quiche soup, Cheesesteak soup, Chicken Cordon Bleu soup, Lasagna soup, and Reuben soup all make great use of cheese.

I used shredded cheddar as a topping for the Chicken Burrito soup, but I wanted a creamy texture without the stronger flavors of Gruyère or cheddar, so I used cream cheese for mellow flavor.

For the Spinach Quiche soup, it’s based on a spinach quiche I grew up with, which my mom made with Swiss cheese. I wanted to make sure that I kept that in this recipe, and Swiss and Gruyère are such a power partnership in my opinion -- those cheese flavors really come through in the soup and complement the spinach and the onions.

I have a Cheesesteak soup. Having grown up outside of Philly, people have strong opinions about Philly cheesesteaks. I’m not a Cheez Whiz fan, but American and provolone complement each other so well.

Lasagna soup. Photo credits to Michele Di Pietro

The Chicken Cordon Bleu soup has a boneless chicken breast stuffed with ham and cheese, rolled in flour, egg and breadcrumbs and fried. When you cut into it, you get that great Swiss cheese oozing out. I wanted to keep the Swiss cheese, which complements the ham, the butter, the bold flavor.

For the Lasagna soup, I actually kept the cheese not mixed into it, but as a topping. I thought it would be too much in the soup, too heavy, so I kept it as a topping because it had the potential more than any cheese to stick and become a mess. It’s a cheese mixture of ricotta, mozzarella, pecorino romano and black pepper. It’s a thick, beautiful soup, and you put a nice dollop of cheese mixture and mix it in so you get a little bite in each piece.

I love my Reuben soup. Just because you create a soup version of a classic dish, it doesn’t mean you can’t change the recipe. I give you the option of eating this soup like French onion soup, where you omit the cheese from the soup and top each slice of roll with it, then put it in the soul and broil it all together.

Cheese is definitely fantastic in soup, but it can become so grainy or clumpy. How do you recommend readers avoid that?

MDP: In my book, I make a note that you can freeze these soups without the dairy and then add them during the reheating process. One other good piece of info for readers: if you freeze and reheat, thaw a soup with dairy in the refrigerator. I have frozen so many soups with dairy; it can work. The main thing is, don’t take the soup out of the freezer and bring it up quickly. Let it defrost in the refrigerator for a couple of days, or on low heat in a pan. You can even add in some fresh cream or milk as you’re cooking it, but don’t bring it to a boil. Boiling it after you add dairy can cause grittiness or clumping.

How do you prevent cheese from clumping in soups?

MDP: The key is to add cheese at the very end, with just residual heat -- either after turning off the heat or at the very end. It’s a similar technique as with pasta, how you have the burner very low or turned off. If heated too high, you risk clumping and if too low, not melting properly. With soup, you might be able to fix it with an immersion blender, or you might not. At a temperature of 150 or so, the protein bonds in the cheese break down and as a result, too much fo the moisture escapes too quickly. Keep the heat very low, and make sure the cheese is one of the last things added to the soup. Whisk very quickly but add the cheese in gradually, one cup at a time, to make sure it melts before adding the next cup.

How do you otherwise ensure the texture of a cheese is correctly cooked in a soup?

MDP: It’s all about expectations. You definitely need to consider the texture and melting factor when selecting the best cheese for any soup. How well does it melt, and then also taste it. Dry-aged cheese like Pecorino Romano and Parmigiano Reggiano doesn’t melt that well. That’s okay as long as you know that texture and are expecting it. If I know what the texture of a particular soup will be going into it, then a grainy texture can work with other ingredients -- for instance, in my Cavatelli with Broccoli Soup. I do add the pecorino at the very end, and while it does melt, there’s a little bit of graininess, but it works with that soup.

So how do you decide which cheese to use for each soup?

MDP: I’m Italian-American, so I grew up putting cheese on every soup on the table -- sprinkled on the soup, not necessarily incorporated into the soup itself. Sometimes you want a certain texture and not a specific flavor, so then use mozzarella or cream cheese. The best cheese for a soup generally has a meltability and smooth texture, like Gruyère, fontina, Monterey Jack. When you add the cheese to the soup, you want to make sure it’s in a form that melts well, like shredded or chopped into pieces. There are certain soups that just meld well with cheeses, like creamy, hearty, thick soups. It doesn’t make sense to add cheese to brothy soups because they clump up and don’t have anything to grab onto. Acid or alcohol will also help break down the cheese better.

Do cooks need to be picky about the quality level or origin when they’re at the grocery store buying cheese for your soups?

MDP: I wouldn’t recommend getting more expensive cheese for most of these recipes, except for real Parmigiano Reggiano and Pecorino Romano. I’m a stickler for those two cheeses themselves, and I try to get the imported cheese itself. You don’t need to be picky about the brand. Gruyere is one of top five cheeses in the world, but we all know how pricey a real Gruyère can be. I use domestic cheese in my soup, because it gets melted in and made part of a bigger group of ingredients. I wanted to make it accessible, since you’re already trying to get a lot of ingredients. Just don’t buy shredded cheese. When you buy a block of cheese and shred it yourself, it melts better, because in shredded cheese, they put some kind of anti-clumping agent and then it doesn’t melt as well.

Bacon cheeseburger soup photo credit Michele Di Pietro

Any tips for grating properly for soups?

MDP: For Pecorino Romano and Parmigiano Reggiano, I do that side of the grater with the little stars for a fine grind. A fine grind on a hard cheese works better than a shred on a hard cheese. But for every other cheese -- with the exception of cream cheese, which is best at room temperature when it’s soft enough to break off pieces with a spoon -- I use the bigger holes on a box grater. I do that for cheddar, American, provolone, Gruyère, Swiss. A few cheeses, I chop very, very finely, because they melt very quickly.

Are there other cheeses that you don’t mention in your cookbook that you recommend for soups?

MDP: Gorgonzola would be amazing -- it’s a soft cheese that melts and adds so much flavor to the right soup. I just didn’t have any dishes for my book that happened to need it, but it’s great. Pepper jack is also a really great melting cheese. I toyed with using pepper jack in my burrito soup.