Easy Chicken Pot Pie Starts With This $3 Canned Soup

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Chicken pot pie is a cozy, hearty dish perfect for feeding a crowd. While the ingredient list is simple — mostly chicken and mixed vegetables, plus a basic roux-forward sauce — the chopping, dicing, and other prep work can be a hassle if you just want something quick. Some store-bought pot pies are better than others, but thankfully, there's a solution that involves a semi-homemade dish: Instead of prepping the ingredients individually, stuff a pie crust with a filling made from Campbell's Chunky Pub-Style Chicken Pot Pie Soup, cover it with the crust's top, and bake until golden brown and heated through (about half an hour at 400 degrees Fahrenheit).

There's precedent for this shortcut — Campbell's cream-based soups are a great addition to all kinds of decadent dishes, including mac and cheese. And this soup is obviously suited for this task, what with its chunks of chicken and carrots, plus peas and wheat flour dumplings. However, a standard can of the chunky poultry soup offers two servings, so using a single can is best if you're making a smaller pie. For a standard version that serves six or eight people, you'll want to purchase a few cans.

While it's easy enough to make this glorious poultry pastry, a few chicken pot pie tips and tricks can help your dish turn out better. For starters, since the filling is soup-based, it naturally has a good bit of liquid, so you'll want to add more chicken and vegetables to thicken it. The good news is you can just pick up some pre-shredded chicken and a bag of frozen vegetables, then add them to the soup as needed until it reaches your preferred ratio.

A store-bought pie crust will make this pot pie even easier. But either way, you'll want to poke a few holes in the top so steam can escape. Otherwise, the heat will get trapped and could cause the top crust to puff up and look irregular once cooked.

For an alternative to pie crust, just load the soup into a cast iron pan and top it with packaged biscuit dough; no bottom crust required. This will work in any oven-safe pan or dish, but season the cooking surface with a little neutral oil to make it easy to remove the contents once cooked. If you want to bake individual pie portions, spoon the ingredients into ramekins and top with one biscuit or a small piece of pie crust. Alternatively, you can make tart-like open-faced pot pies by loosely crimping some biscuit dough around spoonfuls of filling and baking them in a 400-degree-Fahrenheit oven for about 20 minutes.