Best Slow Cooker Tortilla Soup Recipe

Name: Best Slow Cooker Tortilla Soup Recipe
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 4 h
Total time: 4 h 10 min
Yield: 6
Ingredients: 2 medium onions, diced; 1 bell pepper (any color), diced; 3 cloves of garlic; Olive oil; 1 pound raw chicken breast; 1 can diced mushrooms (4 ounces), rinsed well and drained; 1 cup of corn (frozen and thawed or from a can), rinsed well and drained; 1 TBSP ground cumin; 2 tsp chili powder; 4 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth; 2 cans diced tomatoes with green chilies (20 ounces total); 1 can of black beans, drained and rinsed (15 ounces); Juice from half a lime; 4 corn tortillas; Optional: toppings including diced avocado, crumbled feta cheese, or cilantro leaves

by Ashley Keating February 8, 2022

Easy, healthy, and full of great Tex-Mex flavor, this slow cooker tortilla soup recipe is perfect for busy weeknights. If you want to make this vegetarian, add an extra can of black beans instead of the chicken. This soup is a little spicy on account of the chilies.

Ingredients in this Tortilla Soup Recipe

Like most soups, this one is pretty forgiving. You can play around with the ingredients if your family loves or dislikes certain parts of this meal.

Raw Vegetables

As far as raw veggies, we recommend two onions and a bell pepper of any color. You can add more peppers if your family loves them. The onions give this soup a nice flavor.

Canned Vegetables

Canned veggies include mushrooms and corn. The mushrooms are mainly the give the soup some additional nutrition benefits and bulk it up some more. (Did you know that mushrooms are really healthy?) Corn brings some sweetness. Make sure to always rinse your canned vegetables very well to remove as much of the added salt as you can. And check the ingredients to ensure that there’s nothing else added.

Spices

Spices in the soup include cumin and chili powder which are fairly traditional tortilla soup flavors. The chilies in the canned tomatoes bring some heat to the overall dish. Of course you need some tomatoes to make this truly authentic.

Protein

Protein in this tortilla soup comes from the chicken breast and the black beans. You can add the chicken breast whole and raw, which saves a ton of time. Simply shred with two forks once the soup is done. I have had success doing this right in the crockpot. You could alternatively pull them out one-by-one (carefully as they will be hot!), shred them, and put them back in the bowl. The black beans go in near the end because beans can sometimes get mushy if they are cooking for too long. If you don’t want to do this, add the beans at the beginning with everything else. They will likely hold their shape enough for a delicious bowl of soup.

Making the Tortilla Strips

To make the tortillas for this soup, we recommend using corn tortillas with few or no preservatives / chemicals. Slice them—I often use a pizza cutter for this! Then it’s a quick bake in the oven and they are ready to eat.

Finishing Touches

Once the soup and the tortillas are done, you are ready to go crazy with the toppings. I let me family sprinkle on their own tortilla stripes so that they don’t get soggy from sitting in the broth. (My family is not always ready to eat exactly when dinner is ready. Is this a problem for anyone else with small children?) My family loves avocados so chopped avocados are part of virtually every crockpot soup we eat. Crumbed feta cheese or sprinkled cheese would be great here too.

Tortilla soup in crock pot

Do you love the crock pot also? We use our slow cooker all the time. I love dumping some things in a crockpot in the morning and coming home to a delicious dinner in the evening. Or, if I’m at home all day, I love going about my business and every time I go into the kitchen, smelling the delicious aroma of a freshly cooking meal. This crock pot tortilla soup recipe cooks up beautifully in the slow cooker. Veggies soften and become part of the flavor of the soup. The meat cooks up and shreds easily, lending bulk and protein to the final dish. Each member of the family can customize this bowl as they’d like with delicious toppings. This soup is a little bit spicy, on account of the chilies.

How to make this tortilla soup vegetarian

Luckily, soups like this slow cooker tortilla soup recipe are super easy to modified to make vegetarian (or perhaps I should have said “soup-er” easy ). You just want to replace the chicken for a vegetarian protein option. Here we recommend omitting the chicken and adding an extra can of beans instead. The shredded chicken tends to bulk up the soup, so you could consider using just 3.5 cups of broth or adding extra veggies. But soup is so forgiving. If you have more broth, you have more of a traditional soup. If you have less broth or more chunks in the broth, you have more of a chili consistency. Either way, it’s delicious!