Canned Soup For Breakfast: Don't Knock It Till You Try It

Soup for breakfast may seem strange in the United States, but in many other countries, soup is either a key part of breakfast or the star itself. It's especially common in Asia, for instance, Japan, to include miso soup as a standard part of a breakfast spread.

Some of these foreign breakfast soups are available canned in the U.S. or have similar enough mimics that you get an idea of what breakfast is like elsewhere. Mexico's tripe-based menudo comes canned, for example, while canned lentil soups are similar to Turkey's red-lentil-based Ezogelin.

Canned soup for breakfast has several other benefits besides being delicious and well-cultured. It can't be overlooked how quick and easy it is to heat canned soup in the morning, plus brothier soups are easy to toss in a thermos and sip on if you need to hurry out the door. Soup is also light on the stomach but still filling, so you have plenty of energy without the sluggishness that comes from heavy breakfasts like pancakes. Or, if you're hungrier at breakfast than one tin of soup can quench, they're easy to pair with sides or to upgrade with extra ingredients.

Soups, whether for breakfast or not, have long been paired with other foods to better satisfy hunger. Japan's pairing of miso broth, which you can find canned, and sides such as sautéed vegetables, fried or fresh fish, and, of course, rice, is worth trying at home. Korea has a similar sides-for-breakfast setup, though their soups tend to be more complex than miso, such as kimchi soup. Korean soups, including kimchi, are also usually bagged instead of canned as a quirk of their culture, similar to Canada using bags for milk instead of cartons.

If foreign inspiration isn't inspiring you, there are plenty of more familiar pairings. Canned tomato soup goes wonderfully with a side of avocado toast, for example, with or without an egg on top. You can also dig into a bowl of canned cream of chicken soup with hot, fresh buttermilk biscuits as a kind of chicken and dumplings or enjoy a piece of traditional cornbread with canned chilis and chowders. You can also try subbing in any kind of canned potato soup for other breakfast potatoes and pair it with steak and eggs or an NYC bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich.

Canned soups are easy to upgrade if you want something more complex or unique to start the day. Simpler canned soups, especially condensed soups, are the perfect bases to start from. Campbell's condensed chicken noodle is an amazing base because, when simplified, it's only broth, noodles, and some chicken chunks. You can radically transform it by adding plenty of fresh, roasted vegetables, for example, or add strings of egg to make a half chicken noodle, half egg drop soup.

Upgrading canned soups is also an excellent time to use leftover or about-to-spoil ingredients. If you've got some bread that's started going stale, throw chunky canned soups such as clam chowder or beef stew inside to revive it and avoid waste. Or, if the bread can't form a bowl, turn it into croutons to serve with canned French onion soup. If you have any vegetables left over, say, some celery and half an onion, give them a quick roast in a saucepan before mixing in canned minestrone or black bean soup. Finally, leftover rice in amounts too small for making fried rice can be easily enjoyed in or to the side of any soup for more substance.