Chef Jacques Pépin is a renowned culinary icon who offers up a world of special techniques and innovations designed to improve anyone's cooking. To thicken soups, Pépin uses one ingredient that may surprise you at first, but once you try it, you'll want to use it whenever you need a rich and tasty soup, fast.

In an episode of his show "More Fast Food My Way," Pépin adds a remarkably simple ingredient to thicken a leek and mushroom soup: instant mashed potatoes. He says that instant potato flakes not only enrich the soup remarkably well, but they also add an extra layer of flavor, not to mention they're incredibly easy to use.

Instant mashed potatoes can be added to the soup pot without any extra work, unlike thickeners like roux and slurries, which need to be mixed and/or cooked beforehand, or plain flour and cornstarch, which can clump instead of dissolving smoothly. Pépin's trick can turn any soup from special-occasion stuff into a quick weeknight meal.