Crockpot Potato Soup Is My Entire Personality From November to March

The first night it’s cold enough for a blanket on the couch, I dig the slow cooker out of the back of the cupboard. That’s the signal. Potato soup season has started, and nobody gets a vote.

From then until March, there’s almost always a pot going on my counter. I don’t ask whether anyone wants soup. I just announce that there’s soup.

After enough winters of this, I have opinions, and a few of them cost me a whole batch. Crunchy potatoes, curdled cream and grainy freezer soup taught me where the potatoes go, when to add dairy and what to set aside for freezing so the next batch doesn’t go the same way.

Yes, I’m the person who brings it up at every party until March

Once soup season starts, it leaks into every conversation I have. Someone mentions dinner and I’m already describing my last pot like it won an award.

I know it’s a lot. I don’t stop.

My favorite thing to blurt out, usually right after someone calls the slow cooker a lazy appliance, is that it started life as a bean cooker. An electrical engineer named Irving Naxon built the Naxon Beanery All-Purpose Cooker, inspired by his mother’s stories of cholent, a Jewish Sabbath stew left to cook slowly in the town bakery’s oven in Lithuania.

So when I say my soup has a heritage, I mean the machine does. That’s usually when people go refill their drinks somewhere else.

My soup didn’t start out vegetarian, and fixing that was easy

Almost every potato soup recipe I found early on had the same two problems for me. Bacon on top and chicken broth in the pot.

Neither one was hard to replace. Vegetable broth does the job in the pot. For the smoky, salty thing bacon brings, I use smoked paprika, and sometimes a vegetarian bacon-style topping if I’ve got one around.

The cheese took me longer to sort out. Rennet is the enzyme that turns milk into curds, and it traditionally comes from animals. Some cheeses, Parmigiano-Reggiano included, are still made with animal rennet.

Plenty of cheesemakers use microbial rennet now, so it’s not a crisis. I just check the label on the cheddar before it goes in.

Fair warning for vegan readers: my version has milk or cream, butter, cheese and sour cream. Unsweetened plant milk and a few blended potatoes are the obvious swaps if you want it creamy without dairy.

I learned the hard way that the potatoes go on the bottom

My worst batch looked perfect. It had cooked on low all day, the kitchen smelled incredible, and then I bit into a chunk of potato that crunched.

I’d tossed in the onions and everything else first, then piled the potatoes on top like a little beige pyramid. Big mistake.

Vegetables cook slower than you’d think in a slow cooker. Slower than meat, even. That’s why Clemson’s extension guidance, adapted from the USDA, says to put them on the bottom and around the sides.

Now the potatoes go in first, every single time. Everything else sits on top of them.

The same guidance says to fill the cooker no less than half full and no more than two-thirds full. I used to cram mine to the rim because more soup is more soup. Too full and it may not cook through, and too empty and it can overcook.

Then there’s the lid. I used to lift it every time I walked past, just to look.

Every peek lets heat out, and the advice is to lift it only to stir or check whether it’s done. So now I stare through the glass like a kid at an aquarium, which is honestly just as fun.

The cream goes in at the end, and I will die on this hill

I once poured a whole carton of cream in at the start and left it alone all afternoon. I came back to soup with little curds floating in it.

It tasted fine. It looked like a science fair project.

Long heat can curdle milk and cream. So the dairy goes in during the last hour or so, and some cooks wait until the last 30 minutes.

I also warm the cream before it goes in by stirring a ladle of hot soup into it first. That’s called tempering. Between that and sticking with full-fat dairy, my soup hasn’t broken on me since.

The cheese waits until the end too, about an hour before the soup gets served. Stirred in late, it melts into the pot instead of hanging around in clumps.

I like mostly russets, with a few potatoes that hold their shape

My usual pot is mostly russets with a handful of reds or Yukon Golds thrown in so there’s something to chew.

I use russets for their fluffy texture, the same reason they make such good mashed potatoes. After hours in a slow cooker, they start breaking down and thicken the soup on their own.

That’s exactly what I want. A thick, creamy pot that feels like a blanket.

I add reds when I want firm chunks to chase around with a spoon. They’re waxy and stay firm through cooking.

When I want something in between, I use Yukon Golds for their smooth, buttery texture.

Can we stop pretending potatoes are just beige filler?

One medium skin-on potato has more potassium than a medium banana. Nobody calls the banana filler.

According to Potatoes USA, which is the potato industry’s own board, a medium skin-on potato (5.3 oz) has 620 mg of potassium. A medium banana has 422 mg.

That same plain potato has 110 calories, 3 grams of protein and 2 grams of fiber. To be clear, that’s the potato on its own. Once I’ve added cream, cheese and butter, my soup is not a 110-calorie situation.

The “empty carb” reputation drives me up the wall anyway. A potato is not a packing peanut.

Those numbers are for a potato with the skin on, so I leave the skins on. Less peeling, too.

Leftovers are the whole point, so I store them like I mean it

I like day-two potato soup even better than day-one potato soup.

When a pot’s done, the finished leftovers go in the fridge within two hours. The same Clemson guidance says reheating leftovers in a slow cooker isn’t recommended, so I warm mine on the stove or in the microwave.

Freezing took some trial and error. When I froze soup with fully cooked potatoes, they came back grainy, which is the saddest texture a potato can have.

Iowa State’s extension guidance says to undercook the potatoes if they’re headed for the freezer. So when I want a freezer portion, I set it aside before the potatoes finish cooking and before any dairy goes in.

Dairy soups also tend to separate a little after thawing. I freeze that reserved base and add the dairy when I reheat it on the stove, leaving the rest of the pot to finish cooking for dinner and fridge leftovers.

Iowa State says dairy-based soups are best eaten within two months of freezing, and broth-based ones within three. Mine have never come close to either deadline.

See you in April, probably

Irving Naxon built a bean cooker because of a Sabbath stew. I turned it into a five-month personality.

The slow cooker goes back in the cupboard in April. Or when the potatoes run out. Whichever comes later.