Stirring in heavy cream isn’t the only way to make soups taste and feel creamy. It’s just one option among many—one that can mute the flavor of the other ingredients if you're not careful.

You can use root vegetables, beans, and bread, just to name a few alternatives. We have a reliable roster of creamy no-cream soups, but if you find yourself riffing on soups at home, incorporating one of the below ingredients for smooth, satisfying soups that don’t rely on high-fat dairy.

That typically means using fruits, vegetables, starches, eggs or fats, or a combination of two or more of those ingredients. If this sounds like a lot of complex work on your end, don’t worry. It’s not. Many of these soups come together with just a few steps, and often the hard work is finished in seconds through the use of a standard or immersion blender.

Fruits and vegetables add flavor and texture

There’s a wide world of produce ripe for the task of thickening soups. The trick is to exploit them for their full range of sweet, peppery, and earthy flavors, along with their bulking fiber content and silky starches. That they happen to be highly nutritional isn’t such a bad thing either.

In our Cauliflower Soup with Brown Butter Pine Nuts, cauliflower is cooked until completely soft. Once it’s blended with the water it’s boiled in, this fibrous veggie breaks down into a silken soup. Tender pine nuts are toasted in browned butter, and warming spices are added so their flavors can bloom in the fat. The spice-boosted browned butter adds a pleasing heat that complements slight sweetness of the cauliflower and dash of coconut milk.

For more creamy soups that integrate fruit and vegetable purées, try our Zucchini and Green Chili Soup, which uses a combination of zucchini, poblano pepper, and pumpkin seeds to thicken. You can also take a crack at our Thai Red Curry Squash Soup, which relies on a heap of fiber-packed kabocha squash, or our sweet and savory Double Carrot Soup with Fennel and Lime.

Beans are shockingly creamy

Overcooked beans are no reason to despair. Beans are packed with fiber and starch, which provide thickening power while emulsifying fat with water. In our Italian Bean Soup with Fresh Pasta, we pulse the brothy beans until smooth, then return the purée to the pot and add the fresh pasta. The combination of bean puree with starchy pasta water creates a luscious, velvety texture. It’s no wonder it's one of our most popular creamy soups.

For more hearty soups like this, try our Chickpea and Garlic Soup with Cumin-Spiced Butter with warming, savory spices, or our Creamy Fennel and White Bean Soup for fresh, herbal notes.

When in doubt, turn to potatoes

Our cooking technique for potatoes is no different than it is for beans, fruits and vegetables. First, you cook them until they’re soft and nearly falling apart. From there, you can either blend them completely for a uniform texture, or let the broken pieces thicken the soup naturally for a more rustic presentation. The starchier the potato, the more thickening power it will have. We love russet potatoes, like the ones in our Garnish-as-You-Like Potato Leek Soup, for their high starch content and how seamlessly they blend into liquid. Waxier potato varieties hold onto their shape, which makes them less effective for thickening broths (but perfect for when you want discernible cubes of potatoes in your soup).

For nutty complexity and refreshing acidity in your potato soup, try our Potato Soup with Almonds, Garlic and Lemon. And our Portuguese-Style Soup with Potatoes, Kale and Sausage is a great option for a savory, meaty soup that’s both chunky and creamy.

Some of the best thickeners are hiding in your pantry

Potatoes and beans are fantastic thickeners, but they can overpower the other flavors in the soup. Luckily, there are starches that hog less of the spotlight—ones that thicken the soup while letting other ingredients shine. In these soups, we use cornstarch, broken-up bread, and cornmeal as low-profile thickeners.

Our Chili Crisp Chicken and Corn Soup has a silky, translucent type of broth. We use creamed corn, which is sweetened and thickened with cornstarch, along with an extra dose of cornstarch to create an almost gravy-like broth. The corn, chicken, scallion and chili crisp are the main flavors, not the starch.

Our Andalusian Tomato and Bread Soup (Salmorejo) is thickened with rustic bread, tossed straight into a blender with the tomatoes and other ingredients. The result is a notably creamy soup in which the brightness of the tomatoes, bell pepper and vinegar still come through loud and clear. Be sure to remove the crusts, otherwise the bread won’t break down as smoothly into the soup.

Loved for its simplicity, our Polenta Soup with Kale and Parmesan is thickened with coarse cornmeal whisked straight into the broth. The cornmeal flavor is definitely one of the leads here, but it also makes a great supporting character; you can also add proteins and spice-infused oils to leap off the mild corn background.

Add eggs and coconut milk for silkiness

Creamy soups don’t always need to be bulky. For a lighter, silkier creaminess, we look to eggs and coconut milk. These two ingredients are packed with enriching fats that add a silkiness without the heaviness of full-fat dairy. Romanian Lettuce Soup with Bacon and Dill and Georgian Chicken Soup (Chikhirtma) both use egg yolks in the final step. Be sure to temper the egg yolks by mixing them with small amount of hot broth before adding them to the pot.

Coconut milk doesn’t need to be treated quite as tenderly. In our Thai-Style Coconut and Chicken Soup and Jerk-Seasoned Yellow Squash Soup with Coconut, the coconut milk is added early and simmers with the other ingredients, no tempering required.

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Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Allie Chantorn Reinmann is a Digital Staff Writer for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. She’s a Thai-American chef who earned her diploma for Pastry and Baking Arts at The Institute of Culinary Education and worked professionally for over a decade honing her craft in New York City at places like Balthazar, Bien Cuit, The Chocolate Room, Billy’s Bakery and Whole Foods. Allie took her know-how from the kitchen to the internet, writing about food full-time at Lifehacker for three years and starting her own YouTube channel, ThaiNYbites. You can find her whipping up baked goods for cafés around Brooklyn, building wedding cakes and trying her hand (feet?) at marathon running. She’s working on her debut cookbook and lives in Brooklyn, NY.