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I have a lot of frozen stock. I would like to use that stock to make a tomato, leek and basil soup which will be eaten one or two days later.
Is it safe to re-freeze the soup that contains the previously frozen stock?
Am I better off not freezing the soup that I will be consuming in just one or two days?
Soup (and any food) is safe to freeze and re-use as long as you keep in mind these things:
The time the food has been 'out' does not reset when you freeze it. You are putting any harmful microbes on pause, not killing them. Be aware of the total time since your food has been cooked both before and after freezing. Remember that putting something in the freezer does not result in 'instant' freezing unless you have Carbon freezing equipment.
Soup is often fully re-heated to boiling. This does reset the clock on safety, and is one thing that makes soup easier to freeze and re-use than other foods.
Stock also often changes less with re-cooking than something like meat or vegetables, so you damage the end result less (if at all) with frozen soup than with other re-frozen ingredients.
If you are going to be consuming the soup within a couple of days, don't bother freezing. However, there is no issue with refreezing previously frozen stock. Professionally, it is done ALL of the time. We always refroze frozen (and I worked at a high end hotel, not a dump). It's really no big deal (although I'm sure some people will come on here and claim there is a degredation of flavor blah, blah, blah). If you put two bowls of soup from the same batch on the table (one which had been refrozen and one which hadn't), few people could tell the difference (they only think they can)...
It's generally safe to refreeze food that was never above 40 degrees. The rule of thumb about not refreezing things is largely due to changes in flavor and texture. With vegetables or meat, freezing, thawing, and freezing again can cause cell walls to degrade, redistribute fluids, etc. With a stock this is not a problem.
In general when you want to refreeze anything you should thaw it in your fridge rather than on a countertop or in open air. With a soup, assuming you thaw the stock below 40 degrees, then cook, then handle properly, you should have no problem doing this.
I make and freeze my own stocks all the time, then make soups from them and freeze leftovers. I've never noticed a quality issue in doing so.
