Simply Balanced Chicken Tortilla Soup

I always assumed tortilla soup would, you know, have tortillas in it. But what do I know?

Instead, it's a red broth with black beans, corn, and little hunks of chicken. Not bad. The broth is mildly spicy, and the corn and beans are nothing to complain about...although, I wouldn't have minded if there were a lot more of them. 

The soup is pretty soupy...you know, brothy, that is. It's mostly just liquid—not nearly as chunky as the picture on the box would have you believe. That alone wasn't the product's biggest weakness, as the liquid part of the soup was pretty decent and flavorful.

The chicken chunks were all near-perfect cubes, and were abnormally dark, even for dark meat chicken. They were a deep brown—such a gloomy color that I think if I hadn't known any better, I would have assumed they were little pieces of low-grade beef. Fortunately, they didn't taste nearly as bad as they looked. But once again, the soup could have used a good bit more of them.

I definitely think this melange would have benefited from little tortilla bits—either the kind that come in a little plastic bag that you add yourself or the kind that are soft to begin with and don't mind swimming around in salty soup for some indeterminate amount of time on Target's shelves. This soup was crying out for carbs but did not deliver in that department.

So I added some carbs myself in the form of good old-fashioned saltine crackers. They certainly helped, but not quite enough.

It was $2.29 for the box at the Target where we discovered it—I believe somewhere in coastal Georgia, probably near Savannah, as our recent adventures have taken us through The Jewel of the South. It's just a little pricier than your average can of soup, but the box is one ounce bigger, too. But in the end, this product just wasn't enough bang for the buck to be a repeat purchase.

I'll give the soup 6 out of 10 stars.