Condensed Cream of Chicken Soup

Find out how to make homemade condensed chicken soup to use in classic casseroles or other recipes as an alternative to using the canned stuff. Same great taste but you control the ingredients!

A lot of casserole recipes call for a can (or two!) of condensed creamed soup. We, therefore, thought that no casserole series would be complete if we didn’t provide a way for you to make condensed soup at home.

You can absolutely buy cans of condensed soup. But if you don’t like them or if you never have them on hand and want to know what you can do instead, this is it.

This recipe makes 1 and 1/4 cups of condensed soup, which is equivalent to what is in a standard 10.75 ounce can of condensed soup. You can use one batch of the recipe anytime a can of condensed soup is called for. The recipe can be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, etc. to make as many “cans” as your recipe calls for.

Instead of using this in a recipe, you can also turn it into soup. To do so, add 1 and ¼ cups of milk or chicken broth. Stir, heat and serve.

Here’s how to make homemade condensed cream of chicken soup:

Measure 3 tablespoons of butter into a small saucepan over low heat and stir it occasionally until it melts.

Turn off the heat and add in 3 tablespoons of flour.

Whisk it until smooth. I like to use a flat whisk for this because it gets into the very edges of the saucepan really well.

Here’s how it looks when the flour and butter have been whisked well together and are smooth. This is called a roux.

Slowly drizzle in a little bit of the milk and then whisk it in. Continue to add a little bit of milk at a time while whisking continuously so it stays nice and smooth. You’ll add a total of 1/2 cup of milk.

Then slowly add in the chicken stock, also whisking continuously so that it remains smooth.

Return the saucepan to the stove over medium heat. Stir continuously.

It will thicken and come to a simmer.

Once it’s nice and thick like that, remove it from the heat and stir in seasonings. In this case we’re adding ⅛ teaspoon of garlic powder and ⅛ teaspoon of salt. Note that this homemade version of the soup is not as salty as the store-bought. If you want it to be that salty, you can add more salt.

Finally, stir in the finely diced cooked chicken and your condensed cream of chicken soup is ready to use in our classic casseroles (or any other recipe that calls for condensed cream of chicken.  

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