The king of casseroles and frozen meals, these classic ingredients are also integral parts in a creamy, savory comfort food: broccoli and cheddar soup. And while you can always head to your favorite cafe to partake in this particular soup, with this copycat Panera Bread recipe you can have bowls and bowls of broccoli cheddar soup at home in just about one hour.
What do you need to make broccoli cheddar soup?
This soup recipe can be made using common household ingredients. Its main components are butter, chicken or vegetable stock, half-and-half (or a 1-to-1 ratio of milk and heavy cream), frozen broccoli and carrots.
Panera Bread’s soup uses chicken stock, but if you’re a vegetarian, you can easily swap this for vegetable stock. In fact, when we made this soup recently, we channeled our inner budget-friendly goddess and used homemade vegetable stock made in a slow cooker. This is one of our favorite ways to use food scraps, and the resulting broth makes a super scrumptious base for this (or any!) soup.
