No matter the season, weather forecast or time of day, I’m always down for a bowl of soup. I keep homemade chicken and rice, minestrone and even Italian wedding soup stocked in my freezer, as they’re handy to have around when I’m feeling under the weather or the workweek spirals out of control. Turns out, Stanley Tucci is a soup lover too—and a diehard one at that. “To me soup may be the greatest culinary invention,” he writes in his most recent book, What I Ate in One Year. “It can be made with two ingredients or two hundred twenty-two ingredients. It can be served hot or cold. It can be cooked fast or slow. It can be eaten for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It can be vegetarian, vegan, paleo, pescatarian, or carnivorian. It can be simple or complex. It comforts, it soothes, it refreshes, and it restores. Soup is life in a pot.” 

That kind of dedication means that he’s come up with a few tips and tricks (as well as collected a few from family and friends) for turning a bowl of soup into a standout dish—and they’ve made me love a good bowl of soup even more. Here are Tucci’s six life-changing tips for making soup.

1. Make the Most of Seasonal Produce 

For Tucci, soup “season” is not a thing. Any season can be soup season—and that includes summer. During this time, summer squash, string beans and tomatoes are in season, and they’re the perfect building blocks for his grandmother’s minestra, an easy summer soup that doesn’t even require you to sauté the vegetables before letting the soup simmer. In The Tucci Cookbook, he shares that this recipe can even be served hot or cold, and as those in the comments on Instagram point out, this soup can easily be altered based on whatever veggies you have in your fridge. 

2. Add a Drizzle of Olive Oil

In Italian cuisine, a drizzle of good extra-virgin olive oil can elevate even the simplest dishes, and that holds true for so many Italian soups as well. Tucci recommends adding a drizzle to both his summer minestra and his ribollita in The Tucci Cookbook, noting that it will help enhance the flavors in these veggie-forward soups. It also adds a bright note to heavier soups, like his pea and ham hock soup from The Tucci Table. In a few recipes with creamier bases, he even adds truffle oil, which can really make a simple, inexpensive soup feel like a luxury. 

3. Make Broth with Leftover Soup 

Soup lovers know that the secret to a truly delicious soup lies in homemade stock or broth, which often has more depth than the boxed or canned versions you’ll find at the store. However, carving out time to make your own can be tricky. Tucci has a life-changing tip for this too: Use some of your leftover soup! He mentions this “hack” as a note in his chicken soup with tiny chicken meatballs from The Tucci Cookbook, which was his grandmother’s signature soup recipe. The soup starts with simmering a 3-pound chicken and some veggies for about a half hour, then straining it before adding the shredded cooked chicken, chicken meatballs and diced, cooked onions and carrots back to the broth to simmer even longer. The result is so rich that you could strain your leftovers and use the broth as a base in your next soup.

He has a time-saving tip for vegetable stock too: When making his summer vegetable soup, he uses the peelings and ends from his vegetables along with a few fresh additions to make the veggie stock at the same time. This way, nothing goes to waste—especially not your meal-prep time.  

4. Give Tomato Soups Time to Simmer

Compared to hearty stews that need to be simmered for hours, a simple tomato soup seems like it should come together quickly. So I was surprised to learn that Tucci’s Tuscan soup recipe calls for it to simmer for 40 minutes on the stovetop over a low heat. However, that long simmer is the secret to taking a meh tomato soup to lick-the-bowl-clean status. “When cooking anything with tomato, as my mother always says, you want it to lose its ‘tomato-y’ taste,” Tucci writes with the recipe in The Tucci Table. “By this she means that you must slowly cook out the tomatoes’ acidity or tinniness, allowing their sweetness to emerge.” With that in mind, I’ll always give my tomato soup ample time to mellow out. 

5. For a Garnish, Deep-Fry Your Herbs 

Topping a bowl of soup with fresh herbs, a few croutons, or even a dollop of sour cream can help make a simple recipe especially delicious. Deep-frying your herbs, though? That sounds like a restaurant-level upgrade. Tucci adds sprigs of deep-fried parsley to his potato-and-leek soup, an addition that was actually created by his wife, Felicity Blunt, and is featured in The Tucci Table. The result is a fresh contrast to the hearty soup, with a little crunch to contrast the velvety consistency.  

6. Cook Your Pasta Separately 

Adding some spoon-size pasta to a minestrone or noodles to a chicken-and-veggie soup can turn a light lunch into a hearty meal, but I hate how mushy the pasta can get if left to simmer for too long, or when you’re reheating leftovers. Tucci’s suggestion for this is simple: In The Tucci Table, he calls for cooking the noodles in his sister-in-law, Emily Blunt’s, chicken noodle soup separately, rather than in the soup itself. Using this technique ensures that the pasta is always perfectly al dente—a must for any Italian.