A can of soup is a good occasional play for me. There’s a reliable sodium hit, but the calorie count tends to be reasonable, and there are many more appealing options out there than when I was a child. This Chunky Nashville hot chicken soup intrigued me when a Kelce first pitched it to me a couple of weeks ago.
The first thing to know about this soup is that it is not chicken noodle soup. It’s never suggested that it is in the commercial or on the label, but that’s the expectation I brought, so I didn’t notice until I opened the can. I’d call it a sort of chicken chowder. Ingredients as follows:
Chicken Stock, Potatoes, White Chicken Meat, Tomato Puree (Water, Tomato Paste), Red Peppers, Onions, Vegetable Oil, Modified Cornstarch, Contains Less Than 2% Of: Water, Cayenne Pepper Sauce (Cayenne Peppers, Vinegar, Salt, Garlic), Butter (Cream, Salt), Wheat Flour, Salt, Chicken Fat, Yeast Extract, Soy Protein Concentrate, Paprika For Color, Brown Sugar (Sugar, Invert Sugar, Molasses), Flavoring, Dried Garlic, Dried Onions, Spices, Red Pepper, Sodium Phosphate, Vegetable Broth, Cooked Chicken Skins, Dillweed, Beta Carotene For Color, Disodium Inosinate, Disodium Guanylate, Natural Smoke Flavoring, Dried Chicken, Chicken Broth, Egg Yolks. Contains: Egg, Wheat, Milk, Soy
Canned soup isn’t health food, of course, but as modern processed food labels go, this is pretty tame. You get a decent taste expectation, and it looks like most of the heat here comes from (surprise!) a cayenne pepper sauce that may be sold over the counter and red pepper.
The soup is palatable, if unremarkable. It is a pale orange with chicken and potato chunks. Spices are present in the liquid, which is not quite as thick as I expected based on appearances.
Nashville hot chicken is fried chicken, and I wondered how that would play, and the answer is that it doesn’t. The chicken is present as several cubes that almost certainly come from the same receptacle that feeds the regular Chunky chicken noodle soup production line. The dominant flavors are tomato and onion, with a wisp of garlic to finish. Predictably, it is also salty.
There is a fair bit of heat here for a mass-market product. Chileheads won’t need a beverage, but I’d call this half again as hot as regular Tabasco sauce. You know your tolerance. If that sounds too hot for you, it probably is.
Campbell’s Chunky Spicy Nashville-Style Hot Chicken Soup is a product of reasonable quality, but I did not find it memorable enough to make it a recurring purchase.