The Coziest Tortilla Soup
My chicken tortilla soup deserves a spot in your dinner rotation this season. It’s hearty, super filling, and has just a touch of cream cheese to make it slightly creamy but not too rich. Crispy homemade tortilla strips (they’re so easy to make, I promise!) add the perfect crunch and make this a complete meal in a bowl! This soup is loaded with protein from shredded chicken and black beans. It’s a (mostly) wholesome, yet still indulgent meal that is comforting and perfect as a weeknight dinner or cold weather comfort food (like my creamy chicken noodle soup).
What’s to Love About This Recipe
What You Need
Let’s go over a few of the key ingredients that give this soup its flavor. You can find the full list of ingredients further down into the post in the recipe card.
Bacon. While it may be an unlikely suspect, this secret ingredient creates an amazingly flavorful base, just like in my potato soup recipe. If you don’t want to use bacon, that’s fine! I provide instructions on how to make this soup without bacon in the recipe notes below. Chicken. As in my chicken tortilla soup and white chicken chili, I opt to start with pre-shredded chicken (a rotisserie chicken works great here!) Chili powder. Like in my award-winning chili recipe, we are using a combination of regular and ancho chili powder for the most depth of flavor. If you don’t have ancho chili powder, you can just use all regular chili powder instead. The ancho adds a nice smoky element though, which I love! Fire roasted tomatoes. If you can’t find fire roasted, plain diced tomatoes work just fine, but I prefer the smoky depth of flavor the fire roasted version offers. Sugar. I know, I know–we typically save the sugar for the desserts, but just a teaspoon here really rounds out the flavors. I also use sugar in my sloppy joes recipe and tomato soup recipe, so this shouldn’t surprise you too much! Cream cheese. This thickens the soup and adds lots of flavor. You can always skip it for a thinner soup with a more tomato-y base, but I love the creaminess it adds.
SAM’S TIP: I prefer to use rotisserie chicken for this recipe; it’s easy and inexpensive to buy one from the grocery store, shred it, and toss it into the soup. You could also make my easy crockpot shredded chicken and use that instead. Remember, this is just an overview of the ingredients I used and why. For the full recipe please scroll down to the bottom of the post!
How to Make Chicken Tortilla Soup
SAM’S TIP: Preheat your oven before you start the soup, that way it has time to get nice and hot for your tortilla strips!
How to Make the Tortilla Strips
The crispy corn tortilla strips are possibly my favorite part of this soup. While you could just buy pre-made strips, it takes only minutes to make them at home using corn tortillas. This soup makes the perfect cold weather meal. I hope you give it a try this season! Enjoy! Let’s bake together! Subscribe to my newsletter to be notified of all the newest recipes, and find my free recipe tutorials on YouTube 💜 I originally published this recipe in March of 2019. Post has been updated to be more helpful, but the recipe remains unchanged.
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