Campbell’s Soups is an easy, cheap way to eat a hot meal during cold winter days. When you go to the soup aisle, you can find a wide variety of hot, liquid meals to help you keep warm during the snowy days to come. We’ve come a long way since the days when the company was only making tomato soup. But with so many Campbell’s soups out there, which ones are the best?
When you’re not sure which can to choose, here’s a ranking of the top eight (in reverse order) to help you decide.
8. Clam Chowder
Score: 3/10
This soup wasn’t bad, but it definitely wasn’t a soup that I thought was really good. There were chunks of clam inside. The little pieces of celery were still crunchy and looked like cute little versions of regular-sized celery. The rest of the soup just tasted of broth.
This was the thickest soup that I tried. The chunks of potato were the biggest chunks that I found, and they were almost the same texture as a baked potato, which I was a little bit impressed by, but the rest of the soup was not really impressive.
7. Chicken Noodle
Score: 4/10
This yellow soup was not very impressive in terms of taste. The liquid part was chicken broth, which made the taste of the chicken pieces stronger. Considering that they were floating in liquid, the long, rectangular noodles were less soggy than I thought, and cut in such a way that they were fairly easy to eat without a fork. There weren’t that many pieces of chicken in the soup, but each piece was cooked well.
6. Cream of Mushroom
Score: 5/10
This was a pretty okay soup. The entire soup tasted like mushrooms, and there were small pieces of mushroom throughout the soup. The mushroom bits were firm and spongy. They provided a little bit of extra texture to the soup, but there were no other flavors or vegetables.
5. Tomato
Score: 5.5/10
I’ve had different brands of tomato soup before and I’ve always considered it my favorite type of soup, so I had pretty high expectations for this one. The taste of the soup reminded me of ketchup even though mixing it with water got rid of most of the saltiness. Overall, it wasn’t the best tomato soup that I’ve had, but it was still good.
4. Vegetarian Vegetable
Score: 6.5/10
The biggest surprise of this was the liquid part, which tasted like tomato soup. What was really impressive to me was the variety of vegetables that this soup had, with white, yellow, green, and orange veggies mixed in with the liquid. Most of the vegetables were a little bit more soggy than they would usually be when they are microwaved, but the corn and potatoes were both firm. The tomato kind of overwhelmed the flavors of the other vegetables, but the other flavors were there.
3. Vegetable Beef
Score: 8/10
The beef taste was fairly strong in this soup, and muted all of the flavors of the vegetables. Like the vegetables of the vegetable soup, the vegetables of this soup were a bit soggy. The peas were more firm, like microwaved peas are. The chunks of beef were quite large and had notes of other flavors mixed in with the beef taste.
2. Maryland-Style Crab
Score: 8.5/10
I really liked this one. The entire soup definitely tasted like seafood and had a lot of small strips of crab floating around, but it was mostly vegetables. Like the beef soup, the taste of the crab kind of overwhelmed the taste of everything else, but the seafood taste was pleasant and successfully muted the taste of the strongest-tasting vegetables.
1. Mexican-Style Chicken Tortilla
Score: 9.5/10
I wasn’t sure whether I was going to like this type of soup, since I’ve had foods that are supposed to taste like other foods before and have been disappointed (pizza-flavored chips, anyone?). However, I was pleasantly surprised with how similar this soup smelled and tasted like a burrito. It had a lot of rice with both pinto and black beans, red peppers, and chicken. The chicken pieces weren’t very firm, but they were large, almost one-inch long each.
The ingredients said that the soup contained tomato paste, but unlike the vegetable soup, I couldn’t taste it in the soup at all, which was good because it allowed the other flavors to come through beautifully.