Canned Soup Is More Hearty And Satisfying When You Add This Pantry Staple

Canned soup is a lovely, convenient meal indeed. Simply crack open a can and heat it on the stove and you've got yourself a no-fuss dinner. Sometimes, though, you just need something more filling and hearty. Now, you needn't avoid that can of soup in your pantry, just consider sprucing it up with one simple addition that you can also find on those pantry shelves. We're talking, of course, about canned beans. While you can use many different beans for this purpose, my go-to pick is the mild and dynamic cannellini bean. Adding cannellini beans to your can of soup will bring a hefty dose of fiber (about 5 grams per ½ cup) that can keep you full for hours.

For this combo, you can absolutely just open your can and drain your beans before combining with your preferred soup. My favorite hack for bringing these two canned goods together is to blend or mash my beans, and then stir them into my soup (I especially love doing this with tomato soup). Not only will blended beans add a good bit of thickness to your soup, but they can also help dilute the bean-like flavor for anyone who isn't a fan of the incorporated legume's taste but still wants the protein and texture boost.

If you'd prefer to split the baby, so to speak, you can blend half of your beans and add the rest in whole. This combination will do incredibly well in a chicken noodle soup, which can benefit from a bit of thickening and the added texture of whole beans. If you're not up for blending or mashing at all, it's also a perfectly fine idea to bolster your soup's satiating abilities with only whole beans.

Cannellini beans have a lovely, slightly nutty taste and smooth texture that works well with most any soup base, especially if blended. However, it is not the end-all, be-all of beans. There are plenty of other options, and you can absolutely change up your bean choice based on what type of soup you're preparing. For example, if you're making chicken tortilla soup, you can add pureed black beans. The flavor of those black beans will go really well with the spiced taste of your tortilla soup. (You could even, if you so please, skip the canned soup and use those beans to make a simple black bean soup.)

If you're preparing a canned chowder, such as corn or clam, which has a creamy base, cannellini works incredibly well. But you can also use butter beans, which are also mild with a slightly buttery taste. For a hearty beef stew, you can use red kidney beans, which have an earthy, rich flavor that can help bolster the taste of the meat. Really, you can add any bean you please, and prepare said bean in any way you'd like. No matter which type you choose, you're giving that simple can of soup a much-needed oomph.