This blueprint recipe for do-it-yourself soup jars is perfect for back-to-school season and the chilly autumn months. Just add water!

Today’s recipe is a true blueprint in the sense that I won’t be providing any specific ingredients whatsoever. After watching the video and reading the article, I hope that you can come up with your own recipes using the flavors and textures that you love!

(And of course, you can still follow along with the video and make the Sichuan-style beef noodle soup, chicken and white bean soup, soba with tofu and egg, or chicken and hominy soup that I put together, or you can join our Cookbook Club to get these exact recipes later this week and test them yourself!)

Cup Noodles, But Make it Fresh

A little over a decade ago, I was poking through Hugh Fearnly Whittingstall’s excellent River Cottage Veg Everyday book and came across a recipe he called DIY Pot Noodles (“Pot Noodles” is is Brit-speak for instant ramen). The idea is simple: Fill up a mason jar with some pre-cooked noodles, aromatics, vegetables, and some sort of flavorful concentrated soup base, and you’ve got a fresh, just-add-hot-water lunch that is every bit as simple to prep at the office as a styrofoam instant noodle bowl, but far more fresh and delicious.

I loved the idea and immediately got into the kitchen to start playing around with it, seeing what flavor combinations I could develop and testing the best methods for stacking and storing various ingredients. At one point, a friend and I even entertained the idea of opening a kiosk in downtown San Francisco. You’d design your own soup or pick up a premade one, packed with fresh ingredients in a reusable jar. We’d sell coffee and pastries, too, so you could grab lunch while picking up your morning latte. At lunchtime, all you’d need was hot water.

I’m pretty sure I’ve recently seen a robot that does this exact thing at an airport. I guess an idea is only as good as the execution. I’m still open to investors, whether human or android.

In any case, I published four of those recipes on Serious Eats in 2014, including a kimchi and beef jerky noodles cup, a coconut curry shrimp version, one with vegetables and miso-sesame broth, and a super simple chicken noodle version with peas and version.

The noodles were a great starting point, but the method has turned out to be useful for a much wider range of soups. In the intervening years, I’ve started making versions with canned beans or tortilla strips. Rice cakes and tofu. Hominy or leftover rice. If it works in a normal stovetop soup, it works in an instant jar soup—you just have to know how to build the jar.

What follows is a blueprint for designing your own. Once you understand what each component does and where it belongs in the jar, you can put together or meal-prep your own lunches with whatever you have on hand. Let’s build one from the bottom up.

The Jarred Soup Basics

The most useful thing to remember is that the hot water is there to reheat, hydrate, and lightly soften the ingredients. It won’t stay hot long enough to reliably cook raw meat, dried beans, a chunk of carrot, or a nest of uncooked wheat noodles. Anything that needs cooking should be cooked before it goes into the jar. Vegetables you enjoy raw can stay raw, provided you cut them small enough that they heat through. Frozen vegetables—especially peas and corn which survive freezing extremely well—are typically blanched before freezing, which makes them ideal in this context.

Choose a wide-mouth container with a secure lid, large enough for a lunch plus the water that will turn it into soup. A one pint mason jar is a good small serving, but it can get tight. I find that these soup jars are kind of like burritos—our eyes are bigger than the container.A quart-sized wide-mouth jar will give you more room to work, even if you’re only making a single serving. Use a container intended for hot liquids, and follow its temperature-change instructions; ordinary glass, including some storage jars, can crack when boiling water hits it straight from the refrigerator.

You’ll also want a small lidded container or reusable bag for what I call the “Flavor Pack”: the fresh toppings that get added to the jar after reheating. Think herbs, citrus, bean sprouts, nuts, croutons, and other crunchies and smell-niceys. When I first wrote about this method, I used small snack-sized ziplock bags for my fresh aromatics. Since then I’ve discovered a few options for reusable inserts designed to hold salad dressing under a Mason jar lid that work great for storing toppings.

Let’s start building those jars.

Step 1: Start With a Concentrated Flavor Base

Everything you put at the bottom is going to be diluted, so the base should be much more intensely seasoned than a finished soup. Powdered bouillon works just fine (especially for things like dashi), but of the dozens of supermarket brands I’ve taste tested over the years, Better than Bouillon paste is the best option I’ve tried (it also has a particularly high level of actual meat and vegetables in it). Choose chicken, beef, vegetable, or another flavor that makes sense with the rest of your ingredients, then build on it.

Step 2: Layer Flavors

Miso, sesame paste, chile oil, chile-garlic sauce, black bean sauce, hoisin or sriracha, a little soy sauce or fish sauce—anything you might use to season a soup or stew can all contribute flavor. 

Coconut fat or milk can add richness. A small amount of grated ginger or garlic can add bite, though it will keep more of its raw character than it would in a simmered soup. Canned chilies or tomatoes may be the right flavor for some soups.

Just remember: Whatever you add to the jar should taste good without having to cook it first.

You can also start with a concentrate that already has several of those jobs covered. Mentsuyu, the Japanese noodle-soup base made with ingredients like dashi, soy sauce, mirin, and sugar, is a good example. A tablespoon of canned Thai-style curry paste, chili jam, or shrimp paste will add massive flavor with minimal effort. Concentrated Sichuan-style hot pot soup bases (preferably the kind made with beef tallow!) are already designed for diluting and heating. 

Take advantage of it!

Step 3: Season

For a first jar, plan on roughly 1½ cups (350 ml) boiling water and use dilution instructions on your soup base as your starting point. Be aware that instant soup is typically extremely salty. If you want your soup to taste like it came from a college dorm microwave in the middle of the night, go for it. I won’t judge. But it’s always easier to start with less salt and season to taste at the end.Ingredients like hot pot base, miso, soy sauce, jerky, and pickles can all contribute substantial salt, so make sure to adjust the amount of soup base you use accordingly.

Step 4: Add the Protein, Beans, Grains, or Hearty Veg

The bottom of the jar is the wettest, most highly seasoned part. Put ingredients here that can handle sitting in the concentrate, or that benefit from soaking up a little of its flavor. Shredded cooked rotisserie chicken or other leftover bite-sized pieces of meat, small pieces of ready-to-eat tofu, drained canned beans, and canned hominy are all good candidates.

Thin strips of citrus zest can go here, too. Think a strip of mandarin or orange with beef and hot pot seasoning, or lemon with chicken and white beans.

For meat and seafood, stick with fully cooked or ready-to-eat ingredients. Rotisserie chicken is especially convenient. Cooked shrimp, flaked cooked fish work, or even canned or smoked fish can work, as do small pieces of cooked sausage. Shred or chop everything into pieces that will heat through quickly.

Raw pork products like bacon or bits of sausage should be par-cooked before adding to the jar.

If you want things even more convenient, stick with dehydrated meats, like beef, pork, turkey, or salmon jerky. They absorb moisture and soften up while also adding flavor to the broth as they steep. Like making beef jerky tea, if that sounds appetizing to you.

Ready-to-eat fried tofu is particularly good at soaking up broth. A peeled boiled egg can sit down here, too. In a soy-based concentrate, the outside picks up some seasoning as it waits for lunch, just like the ajitsuke tamago you find in your ramen.

Think about this layer as protection for the ingredients above it. The wet seasonings stay low, the protein and other hearty ingredients lay a foundation, while the noodles and more delicate vegetables rest on top until you’re ready to boil them alive.

Step 5: Choose and Cut Your Vegetables

Choose vegetables for the texture they’ll have after a few minutes in hot water. The bonds between vegetable cell walls don’t really start to break down until just under the boiling temperature of water, which means that while green vegetables will get more vibrantly green and very delicate things like lettuces or thinly sliced onions will soften as the soup steeps, no significant cooking is going to occur. 

My basic rule of thumb for soup jar veg is to ask whether it’s something I could potentially eat in a salad. No? Then it doesn’t belong in the jar.

For firm vegetables such as carrots or cabbage, grate them or cut them into fine shreds. Slice snow peas and snap peas thinly across the pod. If you want to put in the effort, you can stir-fry or simmer vegetables that need more softening ahead of time, then chill and drain them before adding them to the jar.

Spinach and finely shredded romaine can go in raw. The spinach wilts, while romaine keeps a little crunch and catches the broth between its folds. Remove tough stems from greens and cut the leaves into pieces you can comfortably eat with a spoon or chopsticks.

Frozen peas, corn, and diced carrots are convenient and come pre-cooked as part of the freezing process. They can be added directly to the jar from the freezer to thaw while they wait for lunchtime.

Put sturdy or cooked vegetables lower down, over the base and protein. Save tender leaves for the top, especially if you want them to stay out of the salty liquid during storage. There’s no single mandatory order for every vegetable. The useful question is whether it will improve or deteriorate while sitting in the base.

Step 6: Add Noodles, Beans, or Grains

Just like with meat and vegetables, noodles will not cook in the jar, they’ll just get reheated. There are some types of noodles—very thin vermicelli, or shirataki noodles for instance—that can just be steeped before eating. Pre-cooked noodles from the Asian supermarket are also very convenient if you can find them. Otherwise, cook dry or fresh noodles according to the package instructions, drain them, spread them out on a sheet tray, drizzle with a little oil to keep them loose, then let them cool completely, tossing occasionally to make sure they’re coated in the oil. I like to par-cook and chill noodles in large batches, then separate them into nests in a muffin tin and freeze them. The frozen noodle pucks are the perfect size for my lunch or my kids’ dinners.

For a soup without noodles, use drained canned beans, lentils, or hominy, or a cooked grain such as rice or barley. These should already be tender. Unlike noodles, beans and hominy can happily sit right down in the base. With beans and lentils, you can control the heartiness of the soup by leaving them whole or mashing them in the bottom of the jar where they can later be stirred up to thicken the broth.

Just remember to go easy on the packing. A jar crammed with cold ingredients leaves little room for hot water and makes a lukewarm lunch. Leave space for broth, stirring, and the flavor pack.

Step 7: Make the Flavor Pack

This little packet makes a surprisingly big difference. Fresh herbs and aromatics can lose their freshness, while crunchy toppings like peanuts, fried shallots, or croutons lose their crunch as they steep in hot broth. Keeping them separate lets you add them at the moment you’ll get the most from their aroma and texture.

Think chopped parsley or cilantro, sliced scallions, thinly sliced fresh chiles, or radishes. A lemon or lime wedge lets you squeeze in the juice just before eating. Pickled ginger, capers, and other pickles can go here if you want them to remain distinct little bursts of flavor. If you want their juices to season the whole broth instead, add those to the base.

Tuck everything into a small food-safe container with a lid or a sealed snack-sized zipper-lock bag, then set it on top of the packed ingredients before sealing and refrigerating the jar until you’re ready to leave for work. These jars will stay good in the fridge for 3-5 days, depending on the ingredients used. (Dried or cured meats will last much longer than fresh ones like rotisserie chicken.)

Step 8: Store Cold and Add Hot Water at Lunchtime

At lunchtime, remove the flavor pack from the jar and top it up with boiling water. Cover it and and let it stand for about 3 minutes. If you want, you can lay a fork or a pair of chopsticks over the top the way you did with Cup Noodles as a kid so that the lid would stay flat while it steamed.

Stir thoroughly, reaching all the way to the bottom. I like to use chopsticks to break up any stubborn pockets of concentrate and loosen the noodles. Mashed beans need a good stir to spread through the broth, too.

Finish with the flavor pack, squeeze in any citrus, and eat.

The Basic DIY Soup Jar Blueprint

Use these as starting proportions and adjust after trying one jar. The weights of noodles, beans, vegetables, and proteins vary too much for a single interchangeable weight to be useful here, so in most cases, just use your own judgment. You know what you like.

Concentrated base: Enough to season about 1 ½ cups (350 ml) water, adjusted for other salty ingredients, plus your choice of complementary seasonings.

Protein: About ⅓ cup shredded or chopped cooked meat, cooked seafood, or ready-to-eat tofu; cooked egg(s); a small amount of intensely flavored jerky; etc.

Vegetables: About ½ cup thinly sliced, shredded, or cooked vegetables, loosely packed.

Noodles or another substantial ingredient: About ½ to ¾ cup cooked noodles, cooked grains, drained canned beans, or hominy; beans may also take the place of the separate protein.

Flavor pack: A few tablespoons of fresh herbs, scallions, or other toppings, with a citrus wedge if you like.

To serve: About 1 ½ cups (350 ml) freshly boiling water, adjusted to your jar and preferred consistency.

Spoon the base into a suitable heatproof container. Add the ingredients that tolerate moisture, followed by noodles (if using) and delicate vegetables. Put the fresh toppings in a separate packet and tuck it into the jar. Seal and refrigerate. To eat, remove the packet, add boiling water, cover, and steep about 3 minutes. Stir thoroughly, check the heat as described above, then add the fresh toppings.

Variations

The four soups in the video show how far you can take the same method. You can follow along in the video, or join the Cookbook Club for fully-written recipes:

Sichuan-style beef noodle soup: Beef base and hot pot seasoning, orange zest, beef jerky, noodles, romaine, and scallions.

Chicken and white bean soup: Mashed white beans and chicken base, shredded chicken, lemon zest, spinach, peas and carrots, and a parsley finish.

Soba with tofu and egg: Mentsuyu, fried tofu, a cooked egg, thinly sliced snow peas, and soba, with scallions if you like.

Chicken and hominy soup: A pozole-inspired combination of chicken base, ancho chile powder, garlic, shredded chicken, hominy, and cabbage, finished with radishes, cilantro, scallions, serrano chiles, and lime.

The older combinations I published over on Serious Eats still work, too: kimchi and beef, chicken and dill, sesame-miso vegetables, or coconut curry with cooked shrimp. Pick the broth you’re in the mood for, build a jar around it, make all your co-workers jealous. (Or be a real one and bring some for them, too.)