Soup is a go-to in our house. We make a batch or two every week, especially with fall coming.
It’s a great way to feed the family with some really healthy options. The problem is sometimes you just don’t have all day to stand over the stove tending to a pot of soup. That’s where the slow cooker or the crockpot comes in.
The following recipes are meant to be used in a crockpot, so you can still make some really excellent soup, but you can take all the thinking and all the work out of it and let the crockpot do the rest while you get something else done.
1) Beef and Butternut Squash Chili
This is a chili with butternut squash and beef, beans, and veggies cooked on low for eight hours. With the crockpot, it’s really hard to get any sort of browning on your meat, so you’re going to want to go ahead and do that first in a separate pan, and you can season it pretty heavily as well. The seasoning will carry over into the liquid and the rest of everything else, like the beans and the squash.
You could probably cut your squash a little bit on the bigger side if you’re cutting it yourself, or if you’re buying it at the store in the produce department where it’s already kind of cut up, look for some bigger chunks because in the eight hour cook time, they’re going to break down pretty far.
I like to do canned diced tomatoes that have the green chilies mixed right in when I’m making chili in the slow cooker, and I also like to do onions, bell pepper, probably frozen or canned corn, and lots of different beans along with beef stock and plenty of chili powder and cumin, garlic powder, and onion powder, salt, and pepper. This one’s really good served with corn chips or tortilla chips or saltine crackers, hot sauce, and sour cream at the end.
2) White Bean and Rosemary Stew
This is dried beans with no soak, cooked in the crockpot with rosemary and tomatoes served with garlic toast. This is a great use of dried beans because if you cook them low and slow with plenty of liquid, you can actually take them all the way to cooked without having to soak them overnight first. Just make sure you’ve got enough liquid in the crockpot, or you’re cooking it low for a long time.
Add your tomatoes in the beginning too, and that can contribute to the flavor in your liquid, and also your rosemary. Just be careful not to use too much dried rosemary because a little can go a long way. I think this one would be really great too if you cut up some bacon, like diced up raw bacon slices, and then cooked them all the way and added that in at the end, because the rosemary and the beans really go well with some kind of fatty, bacony saltiness.
I would probably add diced red onion to this too. I think this would be really good with some fresh arugula and goat cheese on top at the end also.
3) Turkey Chili
This is a classic chili but with turkey meat as opposed to ground beef. The longer you cook it, the better the flavor will be. Brown your turkey with plenty of chili powder in a pan, and then I like to add the onions and the peppers and the corn right to the cooking meat before I add that all to the pot with the canned tomatoes and the beans.
You can do chicken stock or veggie stock if you’re avoiding beef for this one, and just make sure you’ve got enough liquid to not only cover everything but also reduce down a little bit.
If you’ve got the time, cornbread muffins are really great on the side with this, and they’re also really nice if you have like a mini muffin pan or a regular muffin pan. You can make cornbread muffins and they actually freeze really well for later use. You could just pull them out of the freezer the night before.
4) White Bean Chicken Chili
This is shredded chicken with white beans and typically some sort of roasted green chili and corn in a creamy broth. What I’ll do for this is just whole chicken breast and then canned diced green chilies, canned roasted tomatoes, canned corn, canned beans, and then chicken stock and spices, and I will cook it on low for four to six hours, and then at the end you just take the whole chicken breasts out and shred them apart with two forks and then mix it back in.
This will help thicken up your soup along with mashing up some of the beans and the veggies that have broken down.
If you want to make this one creamy, wait until the end when it’s all done and your chicken is shredded, and you can either add some cream cheese in. Just make sure you cut it up pretty small so it mixes evenly, or you can add some heavy cream.
5) Chicken Tortilla Soup
This one is your classic tomato chicken soup with spices. Everything goes in cold. You shred the chicken at the end. Serve it with tortilla strips.
Whatever chicken you use, just leave in relatively big pieces because that will make it easier to shred up. Instead of hoping that it breaks down on its own, it’s almost easier to keep big chunks and then fish them out and shred it. I’ll do a can of corn or some frozen corn and lots of chili powder and canned tomatoes in this one. You’re looking for more of a red soup, not like a white one like a white bean chicken chili.
Serve this one with tortilla chips and shredded cheese and avocado and sour cream. You don’t need to cook any of the veggies ahead of time or anything like that for this. Just put everything in the crockpot, like the whole chicken breast and all your spices and seasoning and everything. They’ll get cooked enough. Probably six hours on low is plenty of time.
Make sure you add a little bit of extra liquid as well. This will thicken up a little bit, but not a whole lot. So you want it to cook down some, but you don’t want to lose all that liquid.
6) Tuscan Sausage and Kale Soup
This is a creamy sausage soup with kale added to it. For this, you’ll want to brown your sausage ahead of time. If you’ve got an Italian seasoned sausage already, that’s fine, but you can just take regular ground pork and add Italian seasoning and ground fennel and fennel seeds and things like that. Go ahead and get a good color on it.
I think you could do probably diced onion in this one as well, and add chicken stock, veggie stock, and then cream.
If you add kale, you’re going to add it at the end. Cut it up to relatively small pieces. Don’t rely on your soup to wilt it too much. You want to probably give it about half an hour in the crockpot to really break down. This one’s good with a can of diced tomatoes thrown in it as well.
7) Tuscan White Bean Soup
This is canned beans with vegetables and a parmesan rind. Lots of veggies are great in this one. If you’re doing something like zucchini or squash, something that tends to be on the wetter side, you’re going to want to wait until the last half an hour to throw that in.
This one, because it’s primarily beans, won’t take a lot of time to cook. If you overcook it, it can break down a lot, so try to keep it to two to three hours. You could even get away with high for two hours. This would be really good with some crusty bread served on the side and olive oil in a dish to dip it in at the table.
Put the parmesan rind in when you’re cooking the soup. It’s not going to break down that much. Just make sure you fish it out because it’s not really edible. It does add a ton of flavor though, and then you’ll want to finish this up with some grated parmesan cheese and possibly a small pasta like ditalini would be really good. Just cook that separate and add it to each bowl as opposed to putting it in the crockpot.
8) Chicken Noodle Soup
This is chicken that has been shredded, noodles added in at the last minute. Typically with chicken noodle soup, you do onion and carrots and celery, so you would want to do those. Just make sure you cut them all evenly sized so they eat well, and then you can put them right in there with your whole chicken breast.
If you want a little bit more depth of flavor, go ahead and season your chicken breast and sear it in a pan first and then put it in whole. Cook it with your veggies and all your stock and then shred it up at the end.
I like to do egg noodles for mine, so those I can cook up really fast just at the end and serve them on the side. Don’t put them in the soup because if you’re going to keep leftovers or anything like that, you can’t really freeze it with pasta in there.
9) Vegetable Soup
This is just a soup made with whatever vegetables you’ve got on hand in the crockpot. Depending on what you’re using, you’re going to want to cut some of them big, some of them small. Different vegetables have different cook times, so this one can get kind of complicated.
If you’re doing harder veggies like onions and carrots, cut them on the smaller side and put them at the bottom so they get more heat. Other things like mushrooms or zucchini, you’ll want to keep those on the top as it’s cooking so they maybe don’t get blasted too much. This is another really good use for a parmesan rind if you have one.
I like to do diced fire roasted tomatoes for soup like this along with vegetable stock. I’ll get the vegetable stock paste that you can buy and you can just kind of mix it in with hot water and really dial it in so it’s not too strong of a flavor.
A fun trick for this is if you take your big vegetables and roast them in the oven, like broccoli or carrots, to get some color on them and then throw them in the crockpot to make your soup, it’ll get a lot more depth of flavor. And this is even something you can do the night before. Just take the insert out of the crockpot and put all your ingredients in once they’re done, and then when it’s time to make dinner, you just pop it in and start it.
10) Lentil Soup
Typically this is a soup of lentils and canned tomatoes with onions and carrots, lemon added at the end. You don’t need to soak the lentils for this one. I typically go with red or green lentils when I’m making lentil soup, and I will do onion, carrot, and celery but heavy on the carrot because it gives a nice sweetness to the soup.
Add lots of lemon and fresh parsley at the end. I also like grated parmesan in this one, and hot sauce like a vinegar based hot sauce.
If you need your lentil soup to be a little bit thicker when you’re done, just stick an immersion blender in it for a little bit and give it a few quick pulses. This will pulverize the lentils and thicken up the soup. For an authentic flavor, I like to add a couple dashes of cumin to this one too.
11) Bean Soup
This is a soup made with dried beans that has been cooked for eight hours. You have to add salt when they’re tender. Bean soup is great. It’s pretty forgiving. You can add whatever flavors you want to.
I like to roast bell pepper or poblano pepper or anything like that, maybe a couple jalapenos, and add a little bit of that to it if I’m doing something like a black bean soup. Bacon is also really great with beans, so if you have some bacon you can chop it up and pan fry it till crispy and then once your soup is done, sprinkle it on top. Sausage would also work for this, like a smoked sausage that’s been sliced up and pan fried a little bit.
Lots of crackers or toast or bread and butter with this one. Sour cream is pretty great on bean soup as well, and cilantro.
12) Broccoli Cheddar Soup
This is a creamy cheese soup with broccoli added to it. You want to go with more of a classic sort of cream soup on this with your onions and carrots and garlic and then heavy cream and stock, and then when you’re adding your cheese, wait till the end to add the cheese so it doesn’t all melt to the bottom and stick to the bottom of the crockpot.
And when you go with the cheddar, you’re going to want to do a milder cheddar so it melts without separating. You can add a few slices of American cheese too. The emulsifying salt in American cheese really helps keep a sauce together. Cut your broccoli relatively small and just add it in for the last hour to make sure it’s cooked thoroughly. Don’t put it in the beginning.
This is another soup where you’ll want to blend part of it to make it thicker. Instead of using the immersion blender just in the basin, this time take a couple ladlefuls out and put them in a small sauce pot and then blend them until smooth with the immersion blender and then add it back in. Lots of cheese served with each bowl for this one.
13) Butternut Squash Soup
This is a squash soup that has been cooked slow and low in broth and then blended. Take your large cubes of squash and season them and roast them in the oven for a little bit first to get a really nice caramelization on the outside before submerging them in stock and then cooking them on low and then blending it. This will give you a lot more depth of flavor.
If you’re adding cream at the end, just stick with heavy cream, not half and half or milk, because those might separate. This would also be really good with sour cream or maybe some goat cheese added at the end. Because of the sweetness of the squash, you could get away with something like sage in this, or rosemary with their big strong flavors. They could hold up pretty well to the squash soup.
We like to make croutons for our squash soup at home. We’ll take just leftover bread and cube it up and lightly fry it in a pan with olive oil and minced garlic and then just throw it right on top of the soup.
14) French Onion Soup
This is onions and butter cooked on low in the crockpot unattended, and then you build the soup in at the end. French onion soup is a tricky one because it takes a long time to cook the onions down to a nice jammy consistency before you add your broth. So the crockpot is a really great trick for that because you can leave it for hours and you’re not going to overdo it.
Add some dried thyme, beef stock, and a splash of Worcestershire to give it a nice classic french onion soup flavor. What I like to do is just make toasted bread croutons, and instead of the whole mess with melting cheese on the top of the soup or putting the bread in and melting cheese on all of it, I just take shredded swiss cheese, put it in the bottom of the bowl, and then put the soup on top of it and a little sprinkle on afterwards, and the heat from the soup melts it plenty. It doesn’t have to be the big fancy production.
A little splash of dry sherry or cooking wine really elevates the flavor of this one too. Do more onions than you would think, because they cook down to practically nothing and you’re going to really want more of them in there when you’re eating.
15) Tomato Sausage Cream Soup
This is a creamy tomato soup with browned sausage in it. Brown your sausage ahead of time. Add plenty of herbs to this. You can do fresh tomato but I think canned tomato is the way to go. Plenty of that, and let that cook for a long time before you add your cream or cream cheese at the end.
This one would be really good with a couple shakes of crushed red pepper in there. It seems to me that this soup would benefit from having a little bit of spice. Fresh basil or fresh parsley would be great too. A little bit of freshness in the green would really look nice on here.
When you’re browning your sausage you don’t have to crumble it up super small like you would for a ground beef taco filling or a sloppy joe. You can leave it in pretty decent sized chunks because it is going to cook in the soup for a while.
16) Creamy Chicken and Pasta Soup
This is a creamy chicken soup that has been cooked all day with the pasta added at the end. When I think of a creamy chicken soup I always think of mushrooms and herbs in it. So you could slice a bunch of mushrooms and pan fry them first till they’re golden brown, and then you put your whole chicken breast in, plenty of herbs, celery, onion, carrot, the cooked mushrooms and stock, and cook it all day.
Shred your chicken at the end and then add some cream to finish. I would want saltine crackers with this one for sure.
When you’re adding your pasta just make sure you add it at the end, and I would probably cook it on the side and then add it to each bowl as opposed to filling the whole batch with pasta, because then when it sits in the fridge overnight it’s just going to soak up a bunch of liquid and turn to mush. Orzo is a great choice for the pasta too, and kind of fun.
17) Chicken and Rice Soup
This is a chicken soup that has been made with shredded chicken and broth, and then the rice is added at the last 45 minutes so it cooks appropriately. Don’t make too big of a batch of this because leftovers don’t hold super well when you’ve got rice in them. It’s going to be a lot less of the soup and more of a rice dish by tomorrow after sitting in the fridge all night.
You can really go crazy with the seasoning on this one. If you want to do just a classic chicken stock and season your chicken breast you can, or you could do something spicy or even Mexican flavor. Throw a little bit of salsa in there in place of some of the liquid. I would do a long grain or a wild rice with this one too so it holds up better to the cooking process and is more of a hearty, full sort of flavor and looks better in the bowl.
This reminds me a lot of a Greek chicken lemon rice soup, and it was pretty heavy on lemon and lots of rice and also egg whites whisked into it for some nice thickness, which would be pretty good here. You would probably just whisk them and then put them in at the end.
18) Pozole Rojo
This is pork and dried chilies that have been cooked for hours with hominy, served with cabbage and lime at the table. Hominy tends to be dried and really hard, kind of like dried beans, so cooking it in the crockpot is a great way to soften it up and make it edible.
Whatever pork you’re using, go for something without bones as opposed to bone-in so you don’t have to sift it out later when you’re shredding up all of your pork. This soup is typically a red tomato and chili broth, so it would go really well with tortilla strips, shredded cabbage, lime juice, sliced radishes, sour cream, and hot sauce, and lime wedges or green onion too.
Take your pork and season it and sear it first hard on the outside before you add it to your soup, and cook it all day to give you some extra flavor.
19) Chicken Stew
This is a stew of chicken and veggies served with bread on the side. Take your chicken and cut it up into cubes. Season it with flour and salt and pepper and sear it hard in a pan to get some golden brown on the outside. You’re not looking to cook it thoroughly, you just want to develop some extra flavor there, and then throw that in the bottom of your crockpot.
Stack all your veggies on top and your stock. You don’t want to go too heavy on the stock because you don’t want it to be a soup, you want it to be more of a stew, so as it cooks down the liquid will mix with the flour that was left over on the chicken and it’ll give you more of a stew consistency.
If it’s not thick enough at the end when you’re done, you can make a simple cornstarch slurry of two parts water to one part cornstarch. You want it to be like a liquid that’s white and cloudy, and you would just add that in, not too much, but add it in and stir it up until you see the desired thickness you’re looking for. I would serve this one with sliced bread with butter on it or dinner rolls or even Hawaiian sweet rolls.
20) Beef and Potato Stew
This is a seared beef stew with potatoes cooked for eight hours. When I do beef stew I do onions and carrots and potatoes, and I will season my beef with salt, pepper, and garlic powder and flour. I like to do the seasoning on first and then the flour because then I feel like it doesn’t get washed off. If you mix it all together it’s kind of hard to get the seasoning on the meat.
And then you’re going to want to sear it in a separate pan, not your crockpot. Sear it on all sides to get some good browning on it and then throw that in the bottom of the crockpot, and then you add your potatoes and your onions and your carrots and your beef stock, a little bit of red wine, a couple bay leaves, and then let that cook for about eight hours. Again in this one the flour is going to come off of your seared meat and that’s going to not quite make a roux but sort of, and that will help to thicken up over the cooking process.
Keep your vegetable pieces really big for this one. I like to do a really rustic presentation where you’re probably getting like one or two pieces of carrot or potato in the bowl because they’re so big. That’s because they’ve been cooking for eight hours, so I mean they probably only take an hour to cook in the crockpot, and the bigger you leave them the better consistency they’ll be after that long cook time.
This one’s great with bread, also really good with cornbread or again dinner rolls.
21) Tomato Soup
This is canned tomatoes with onions and garlic cooked all day and then blended with cream at the end, served with the classic grilled cheese. I would do lots of onion and garlic and probably carrot or celery, a little something to cut through, because if it’s all canned tomatoes in their juices that’s a pretty acidic, tomato forward flavor so it can be kind of hard to overcome with just cream at the end.
Maybe even look for the fire roasted diced tomatoes to give you a little more depth of flavor too. Don’t be shy about adding whole basil leaves into this too and letting it cook, because if you blend it all up at the end you won’t even know and it’ll be really great flavor.
Add lots of heavy cream after you blend it to give you the perfect consistency, and then you’re going to want to give it a little bit more time, maybe 20 minutes or half an hour, to heat back up in the crockpot before you serve it.
A fun thing I like to do for a tomato soup like this is typically it’d be paired with grilled cheese, but if you take grilled cheese and you make a couple of them and then you cut them into little cubes like you’re making croutons and then pan fry them again just a little bit more, it’s fun to serve your soup with a little basil garnish and then some grilled cheese croutons.
