This creamy white bean and ground chicken soup is one of my favorite meal prep recipes. It makes a big batch with 10 massive servings weighing around 3/4-pound each. And every serving is packed with 23 grams of protein, 8 grams of filling fiber, and just 255 calories. You’ll never believe a chicken soup could be this creamy with only 3 grams of fat per serving!
This recipe is based on a turkey chili recipe from a member of our best Austin, Texas restaurants list, Jack Gilmore of Jack Allen’s Kitchen. If you’re a JA fan, you can get his cookbook here.
How to Make This White Bean Ground Chicken Soup
This is a really simple recipe that’s as easy as cooking some bacon, onion, and ground chicken together before adding salsa verde, canned white beans, chicken broth, and a handful of seasonings. But there are plenty of tweaks you can make to both ingredients and cooking methods. For example, I’ve included instructions for an Instant Pot or pressure cooker, stovetop, and slow cooker in the post below.
If you’re using an Instant Pot and are ready to rock, you can probably skip straight to the recipe card at the bottom of the post.
Cook center cut bacon before cooking diced onion in the rendered fat.
This recipe originally called for cooking the bacon and onion together, but it’s been updated to cook the bacon on its own and transferring out of the pot before adding the onion. This helps eliminate any overly soft pieces of fat in the finished soup.
Add ground chicken and break apart to fully cook.
While I’m typically screaming from the rooftops to properly brown meats via the Maillard reaction, some recipes like soup are fine without it. That’s the case here. Just add the ground chicken and break it apart to fully cook.
Add canned white beans, salsa verde, chopped garlic, corn tortillas, ground cumin and coriander, dried oregano, and chicken broth.
I used a jar of Herdez salsa verde. While it’s not the world’s best salsa verde, it’s super convenient. Making your own homemade salsa verde or a tomatillo sauce would be the best move if you’re up for it.
The corn tortillas will thicken your ground chicken soup and provide some great flavor, so don’t forget to add them!
If you want to skip the tortillas, check out this Greek lemon soup for an alternative method to thicken soup using emulsified eggs.
And for the garlic, the recipe calls for raw chopped garlic. I think adding a little extra garlic powder would be fine if you like a garlic-heavy soup. Or if you really wanted to up your game, you could make some of my air fryer roasted garlic ahead of time and use that.
Cook until the tortillas have completely dissolved and the garlic and onion are tender.
Continue stirring and simmering until the tortillas are no longer visible. This will properly thicken the soup and properly develop flavors.
Cooking Method Options
Here’s a quick rundown of the different methods you can use to cook your ground chicken soup.
Instant Pot
This is the method I used for testing, and it’s what’s used in the photos you see above. Once you have everything in the pot mixed together, simply seal and cook with high pressure for 20 minutes. You can use quick release pressure if you’re ready to serve right away, or you can let everything hang out together and let the pressure vent naturally.
Stovetop
Cook the bacon and onion in a large soup pot over medium-high heat, starting in a room temperature pot. Achieve the same browning before adding and cooking the ground chicken.
Once everything is in the pot together, bring your ground chicken soup up to a boil before reducing to a simmer for about 30 minutes. You can add extra broth if your soup reduces more than you’d like.
Side note: You can watch this soup from start to finish in the video below.
Slow Cooker
Use a large skillet to brown the bacon and onion before adding the ground chicken and fully cooking. Add the mixture to a slow cooker with everything else and cook on low for around 3-4 hours. You can obviously let it go longer.
You can also use a slow cooker to make a very similar recipe with boneless chicken thighs in my creamy salsa verde chicken stew.
How to Serve This Creamy White Bean Ground Chicken Soup
With the high protein content, we like to serve this soup as a main dish. A little freshly chopped cilantro, jalapeño, and avocado works perfectly on top. You might also like queso fresco and a dollop of sour cream or fat free Greek yogurt.
The Tex-Mex flavors mean tortilla chips edge out the typical crusty bread you might serve with a white bean soup. I like baking extra thin corn tortillas to make lower calorie tortilla chips and strips.
To add some more veggies to the affair, you might try something like a chopped Mexican salad or guacamole greens salad.
More High Protein Soup and Chili Recipes
- Creamy Taco Soup
- Slow Cooker Texas Chili
- The Easiest Hamburger Potato Soup
- White Chicken Chili
- Mexican Chicken Soup
I hope you enjoy your white bean ground chicken soup! If you do, I always appreciate recipe reviews. And if you have a question about the recipe I forgot to cover, leave a comment at the bottom of this post.
White Bean Ground Chicken Soup
Ingredients
- 8 slices Center Cut Bacon, diced
- 3 cups 340g White Onion, diced (about 2 large onions)
- 1 pound Ground Chicken, 97/3
- 3 cans, 15 oz each White Kidney Beans, undrained
- 16 oz jar Salsa Verde
- 4 cups Low Sodium Chicken Broth
- 10 cloves Garlic, peeled and roughly chopped
- 1 tablespoon Ground Cumin
- 1 tablespoon Ground Coriander
- 1 tablespoon Dried Oregano
- 4 Corn Tortillas, chopped
Instructions
- Add the diced bacon to an Instant Pot, pressure cooker, or soup pot at room temperature. Turn the sauté function on or use a medium-high heat to cook until crispy, about 6-8 minutes. Transfer the bacon to a plate or bowl lined with a paper towel and set aside.
- Add the onion to the rendered bacon fat and cook until it begins to soften, about 4-5 minutes.
- Add the ground chicken to the softened onion and break apart to fully cook.
- Once the chicken is cooked, add the remaining ingredients and stir everything together.
- Seal and pressure cook for 20 minutes with quick release pressure. Or bring to a boil before reducing to a simmer for about an hour on the stovetop until the soup thickens and the tortillas completely dissolve after stirring.
- Salt and pepper to taste. Top with cilantro, avocado, jalapeño, and sour cream or fat free Greek yogurt. Serve with tortilla chips, if desired.
Hi! I am a bit confused about the macros here. Macros for any bacon that I have ever found do not include the fat that comes off of it, only the bacon post-cooking. How do you track this?
All we have really have to go on is packaging. You could go through the trouble of calculating how much fat is rendered from 8 slices of center cut bacon and then find the nutrition data for pork fat in the USDA database, but that’s a lot of work. Especially when you consider it’s spread across 10 servings. Let’s say you have a tablespoon of rendered bacon fat that’s maybe 120-130 calories. That would equate to an extra 1.5 gram and 12-13 calories per serving.
Slowcooker option? I’m scared of the instapot
There’s a note in the post above about slow cooker prep. Right above the recipe card and serving options.
While today wasn’t much of a soup weather day (almost 90 degrees), I still enjoyed this soup for lunch. It makes a nice amount that works great for meal prep. Servings are generous too. Super easy and so good! I used the already chopped up bacon pieces from costco (less work, less mess) This would be a great recipe for feeding a crowd!
Hi, thanks for the recipe! It says the beans are undrained, do you add the liquid to the pot as well? What size Or weight in corn tortillas do you chop up to add?
Yes, the beans go straight in the pot undrained. And the corn tortillas are standard 6″ tortillas.
This was so good. I cooked it on the stovetop. My whole family loved it. However, I did not have salsa verde so I just added a can of fire roasted tomatoes and a can of white corn. Incredibly good!
Great improvisation, chef!
So, so good! I made a few changes- not because it needed it or because I’m a good cook (I’m really not), but because I didn’t have all the ingredients. I used minced garlic instead of fresh, a pack of fajita seasoning instead of the listed spices, added a little salt, cumin and oregano, and Liquid Smoke instead of bacon. I also added a little bullion paste. I didn’t add the tortillas but it still thickened nicely. Literally, the hardest part was chopping three cups of onions. I cooked it on the stovetop but I can totally see this as a great crockpot recipe- after you sauté the onions and brown the bacon and chicken, there’s really nothing left. It’s a pretty versatile recipe given I made a few substitutions and it was still really, really good. I love your recipes!
That’s some impressive improvisation from a self-proclaimed bad cook. Don’t tell anyone, but I occasionally buy pre-diced onion in the 3.5 cups containers from HEB. Our little secret.
Made this today and immediately texted the link to my friends! I used Riley bacon because it’s what I has on hand and this is still delicious. Okay easy and quick in the foodie- though I may try the crock pot next time because, well, fall.
Loved the recipe! Even my husband who doesn’t like soup enjoyed it.
This is delicious and so simple if you buy pre-peeled garlic and pre-chopped onion. Could you do 2 lbs of chicken instead of 1 and cut down on beans? I’d love a bit more protein.
Is there a reason you use white kidney beans as opposed to any other bean? I made this yesterday using half the white kidney and half pinto and it was amazing! A+ recipe
I find white kidney beans to be the most tender, and the canned beans make the soup a bit creamier than other options. Pinto is another great option, though. It fits the flavor profile perfectly here. Nice swap!