Great Potato Soup

The Mud Bay Blog doesn’t often rave about a product you can buy in the grocery store. Safeway’s baked potato soup with bacon, available in its Signature Café, is worth an exception. The soup is that good.

I don’t consider myself a soup expert. I rarely order soup in restaurants, and I don’t make soup at home from scratch. I do eat soup for lunch several times a week during the winter. My soup skills consist of adding extra veggies and meat to canned or boxed soup I buy at the grocery store, whatever ingredients I think the chefs skimped on. Usually the soup is better when I’m done meddling with it, but not always.

With Safeway’s baked potato soup, you don’t need to add anything. The stuff is perfect right out of the container. Just heat it and serve. It’s even good cold, just not as good.

Here’s the way Safeway describes it:

Russet potatoes and bacon with yellow and white cheddar cheeses and chives, rich & creamy

I would preface that with “A delicious blend of….”

So why is it so tasty? The Signature Café soups, which are refrigerated, are pricier than the canned and boxed soups Safeway sells. At my Safeway, the large containers (24 oz.) are regularly priced at $4.99, although you can usually get them on sale for $3.99. But pricier doesn’t always equate to better. I have tried several other Signature Café soups—there are about 20 varieties in all. They are OK, just not worth a rave. In fact, I found myself doctoring up the chunky chicken noodle soup with additional chicken, carrots, and celery.

Perhaps it’s the calories that are packed in per serving (400) or calories from fat (240). For comparison the chunky chicken noodle soup’s numbers are 160 and 45. Safeway considers a serving to be 8 oz. Hey, I didn’t say to eat it all the time. Just when it’s a cold rainy day and you are home from work and you want something really good.

I’m not going to get into the amount of sodium, cholesterol, fiber, and protein in Safeway’s baked potato soup. I think it compares favorably with other soups in the Signature Café. That information is available online at web sites like Calorie Count and, of course, on the soup container’s label.

One more thing. The soup comes with directions for heating it in a microwave. I haven’t tried them. I heat it up slowly in a saucepan. It’s worth waiting for.