Easy Corn Soup can be made with either fresh or frozen corn. You can make it on the stove or Instant Pot for convenience. Only 4-ingredients and spices. It’s sweet, creamy, and delicious. Naturally gluten-free and can be easily modified to be vegan. Great any time of the year!
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This post was first published on Aug 17, 2015 and is now updated with more information, variations, different techniques, photos, and video.
Food bloggers are people also. And despite all what is involved in developing a recipe and publishing a post, we make mistakes.
If you’d like to read more about what it actually takes to publish a post, then read my article: Truth About Food Bloggers.
Years ago I purchased a bag of frozen corn from Costco. As it turned out that bag could feed a small village. This recipe for Easy Corn Soup came out of desperation of trying to use all that corn filling up half of my freezer.
Four or five Easy Corn Soups (and a few casseroles) later I was finally done with that corn. I wrote down the recipe, took the photos, clicked publish on the blog post and forgot about it.
Another few years later when Imagelicious site got redesigned, I updated the post to appropriate formatting and haven’t touched it since.
Fast forward to now and I just recently had a lovely corn soup at a restaurant which reminded me of this recipe. I decided to adapt it to cook in Instant Pot.
As it turned out, somewhere between writing down the recipe for the first time or re-formatting it a few years later, I made a mistake. I am human after all. The proportion of the ingredients was wrong.
I wish I could say my recipe development skills were strong enough to catch that mistake before following my own wrong directions but that is not true. I ended up with inedible mess that really made me doubt my abilities as a cook, recipe developer, and a food blogger.
Luckily, I didn’t give up. I took a day off. I got up the next morning with the mantra that food blogging isn’t a hobby, it’s a job and fails like this are all part of the job. I ended up fixing my mistake (which was pretty obvious in retrospect) and turning it into Instant Pot Corn Soup.
This Easy Corn Soup is pretty magical. It has only 4-ingredients and one of them is broth and spices that could be changed up to suit your taste. And it can be made on the stove or in Instant Pot for convenience. It is also naturally gluten-free!!
Ingredients to make Easy Corn Soup
- Corn (fresh or frozen)
- Potatoes
- Chicken broth (or vegetable broth if following vegetarian diet)
- Cream (optional or use coconut milk for vegan option)
- Seasonings (I use simple salt, pepper, and paprika)
Can you use frozen corn to make Corn Soup?
Either fresh or frozen corn can be used to make this Easy Corn Soup Recipe. I love using frozen corn because it is super easy, convenient and nutritious.
There’s a lot of negativity associated with frozen produce but in fact, frozen vegetables are often tastier than fresh out of season. Frozen produce is always picked right in season when it’s ripe and it’s most often frozen within hours of picking, as opposed to fresh produce that sometimes stays on store shelves for days.
How to make Instant Pot Corn Soup
I have mentioned many times that for me the beauty of cooking in Instant Pot is not the speed because very often it is not much faster, but convenience. So, this is why I love making Instant Pot Corn Soup. I can put everything in my pot and go run errands without needing to watch the stove.
- Add all the ingredients except for cream to Instant Pot.
- Cook on High Pressure for 3 minutes.
- Do a quick or natural release.
- Blend, add the cream and serve.
You can either do a quick release or a natural release for this recipe. The taste will be the same. Be careful when doing quick release as the steam will have some starches from the potatoes.
I like doing a Controlled Quick Release which means you turn the valve to do the quick release and then turn it back to seal and then repeat a few times. This way the pressure releases in small bursts at first. After doing it a few times (5-7 or so), the steam shouldn’t be as strong and intense and you can do a regular quick release.
How to make Corn Soup on the Stove
Originally when I developed this recipe many years ago, I did not have Instant Pot so I always made it on the stove.
- Cook the potatoes in broth until tender.
- Add the corn and cook for another 10-15 minutes.
- Blend using an immersion or regular blender, add the cream and serve.
What blender to use to puree the soup
I use a simple immersion blender that I’ve had for over a decade. That model isn’t even sold anymore but this is the same brand and it’s very similar to what I have.
However, immersion blender doesn’t make this soup super smooth, there’s still texture because of the corn skin.
If you prefer really smooth and creamy texture, then you should use a very powerful blender, like this one.
How to garnish Easy Corn Soup
Garnishing this Easy Corn Soup is a lot of fun and you can make this soup taste different every time.
- Crispy bacon crumbles
- Or for some fun variations: crispy pancetta or crispy prosciutto
- Extra cream drizzled on top
- Herbs: cilantro is my favourite with this soup and I also love chives
- Crumbled feta or goat cheese
- Shaved parmesan
- Garlic croutons
- Crispy onion
In fact, you could make it fun and serve Corn Soup with a toppings bar so everyone could choose whatever they want to add as a garnish!
Ingredients and variations for Easy Corn Soup
- Potatoes
- You cannot really omit the potatoes as they add the thickness to the soup.
- You might be able to use turnip or rutabaga or even cauliflower instead if you don’t eat potatoes but I haven’t tried personally. Let me know if you try.
- Corn
- You could use fresh or frozen.
- If you use frozen corn, no need to defrost.
- If you use fresh corn, make sure that there are no corn silk strands present.
- Broth
- Cream
- To be honest, cream is optional. It just adds a very light creamy flavour.
- You can use 10%, 18%, or 35% cream.
- For vegan option you can omit or use coconut milk.
- Seasonings
- I use simple salt, pepper, and paprika.
- You may need to use more salt as in my family we don’t use a lot of sodium.
- You can use curry powder to add a fun flavour to this soup also.
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Easy Corn Soup
Ingredients
- 1 pound peeled potatoes
- 4 cups chicken broth (or vegetable broth)
- 5 cups frozen or fresh corn (that's about one bag of corn that is 750g)
- 1/2 cup heavy cream (optional)
- 3/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon pepper
- 1/2 teaspoon paprika
Instructions
Make Easy Corn Soup on the Stove
- Roughly chop the potatoes, add them to a large pot, pour stock over them and bring to boil.
- Boil for about 10-15 minutes until potatoes start to get soft.
- Add corn, seasonings and simmer for another 5-10 minutes until potatoes and corn are fully cooked.
- Either add the soup to your blender to blend or use immersion blender to blend the soup to a smooth consistency.
- Add cream, if using, and let simmer for another couple of minutes.
Make Instant Pot Corn Soup
- Add all the ingredients except for the cream to your Instant Pot.
- Close and lock the lid.
- Turn the vent on the lid to the sealing position.
- Press Manual or Pressure Cooker button (depending on your model) and using the arrow buttons set the cook time to 3 minutes. Use default High Pressure.
- Depending on your Instant Pot model and how cold the broth is and whether the corn is frozen or fresh, it'll take around 15-20 minutes to come to pressure. Be patient.
- Once the Instant Pot beeps that the 3 minutes of cooking are done, do a quick release. This will take about 5 minutes. If you'd like, you could do a Natural Pressure Release as well, which means just leave your Instant Pot be and it'll release the pressure naturally. It could take up to 30 minutes.
- Once the pressure is released, open the lid and use an immersion blender or a regular blender to puree the soup until it is very smooth.
- Add the cream if using, mix, and serve.
Video
Notes
Nutrition
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Just for fun, here’s the old photo from about 5 years ago. I still like it actually 🙂
TammyRenea @San Pasqual's Kitchen says
This soup looks so good and comforting. With so few ingredients, why not give it a try! I think I will. 🙂
Imagelicious says
I hope you like this soup. Remember to season it to your taste as corn is pretty sweet.