Credit: Liv Averett / Cuisine Adventures / Door Dash
We’re currently in the throes of soup season—but it’s always soup season at Sporked HQ, where we’re constantly taste testing brothy soups, creamy soups, chilis, and chowders. This year, we finally got around to tasting broccoli cheese soup and French onion soup, and we found a couple of real bangers amongst the mediocre slop. Hot tip: If you’re looking for the best soup, don’t forget to look in the refrigerated and frozen sections.
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If you’re like us, you blithely assumed that Panera at Home makes the best broccoli cheese soup. While Panera’s broccoli cheese soup is extremely delicious (it came in at #2 on list), it couldn’t quite hang with Signature Cafe Broccoli Cheddar Soup. Like Panera’s line of grocery store soups, this stuff comes in a microwavable plastic tub in a cooler near the deli. Heat it up and it’s a revelation—it’s rich and creamy, and has the perfect blend of seasonings. It’s gluten free to boot. If you shop at an Albertsons-owned grocery store give it a shot.
There sure is a lot of bad French onion soup at the grocery store. We taste tested powdered mixes and canned onion soups alike, and most of them were bad. Not just mediocre, but genuinely gross, with very few exceptions. But then we found it, nestled in the frozen section at our local Trader Joe’s: Cuisine Adventures French Onion Soup. A box comes with two frozen cylinders of soup; you simply pop one in an oven safe crock, heat it in the oven, and, voila, French onion soup complete with crouton and melty gruyere cheese on top. The soup itself is fantastic. It has so much rich flavor you’d swear it was made with beef broth or stock, but it’s actually vegetarian. The best soup is surprising, and this stuff definitely is.
Gwynedd Stuart, Sporked’s managing editor, is an L.A.-based writer and editor who spends way, way too much time at the grocery store. She’s never met an Old El Paso taco or mozzarella stick she didn’t like.
Thoughts? Questions? Complete disagreement? Leave a comment!
Thoughts? Questions? Complete disagreement? Leave a comment!