Hamburger Soup is a quick and easy meal loaded with vegetables, lean beef, diced tomatoes and potatoes. It’s great made ahead of time, budget friendly, reheats well and freezes perfectly.
We serve this easy Hamburger Soup with a fresh green salad and some crusty bread for the perfect meal!
I love a good soup as a weeknight meal. Hearty soups are satisfying & simple and they are loaded with vegetables and healthy ingredients! Soup is the perfect cool weather food or delicious weeknight dinner!
You can make them totally low cal like a Weight Loss Vegetable Soup, nice and hearty like a Chicken Wild Rice Soup or rich and creamy like a Slow Cooker Corn Chowder!
This Hamburger Soup is simple classic comfort food, hearty, healthy and satisfying. Perfect on a cool evening to warm your belly from the inside out.
I have to say that while we’ve always referred to this as hamburger soup, I know you guys have tons of other names for it! Hamburger soup, vegetable soup, hangover soup, poor man’s soup, bachelor’s stew… just to name a few.
Regardless of what you call it, you’ll definitely want to make it!
How to Make Hamburger Soup
A rich tomato broth is filled with ground beef, tender potatoes and vegetables. Sometimes the most simple ingredients make the best ever meals.
This hamburger soup is not only delicious, it’s easy to make with ingredients you likely have on hand.
I start with a mixture of lean beef, onion and garlic browned and drained. You can use any kind of ground meat in this recipe including ground turkey.
Beef broth is the best broth option to add lots of great flavor; I personally prefer the low sodium variety.
Hamburger Soup with Vegetables
I use a mixture of frozen vegetables to make this super easy (no chopping, no prepping) but it’s also a great way to use up any veggies in your fridge. Carrots, celery, peas, beans, zucchini… pretty much anything goes, sometimes we make this even with cabbage!
This version of Hamburger Soup uses potatoes since that’s how we always had it growing up. If you don’t have potatoes on hand (or just prefer pasta) you can add any type of pasta into this recipe!
I add an extra 1 cup of broth (or water) and let the pasta simmer until tender. Macaroni, shells and rotini are favorites to make this into a delicious and hearty macaroni beef soup!
What to Serve with Hamburger Soup
While the soup is simmering, I prepare a quick chopped salad and slice up a loaf of french bread (almost always served with Homemade Garlic Butter) for a complete meal.
If you’re lucky enough to have leftovers, this soup is great reheated for lunches all week but even better, it freezes perfectly!
I prop up a freezer bag in my little baggie holder and fill each baggie with one serving.
When I need a quick lunch, I take it out of the freezer the night before or in the morning and microwave for a perfect meal. (And then sometimes add a little sprinkle of cheese before serving).
This has been a family favorite forever!
It gets rave reviews from everyone who tries it, it’s quick and easy to make, reheats well and is versatile. The perfect soup.
This is also an excellent gifting soup.
If you know anyone that’s recently had a baby or surgery, or is just having an extra crazy week with the kids, this is the soup to drop off.
Add along a side of 30 Minute Dinner Rolls for the perfect meal!
It stretches to feed a crowd with that salad and bread and will last a few days.
Ingredients
- 1 pound lean ground beef
- 1 onion diced
- 2 cloves garlic minced
- 2 medium potatoes peeled and diced
- 3 ½ cups beef broth
- 28 ounces canned diced tomatoes with juices, 1 can
- 10.75 ounces condensed tomato soup 1 can
- 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
- 1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
- 1 bay leaf
- salt and black pepper to taste
- 3 cups frozen mixed vegetables or fresh chopped vegetables
Instructions
- Brown onion, ground beef and garlic until no pink remains. Drain any fat.
- Add potatoes, broth, tomatoes, tomato soup, Worcestershire sauce, seasoning and bay leaves. Simmer covered 10 minutes.
- Stir in vegetables. Simmer 15-20 minutes or until potatoes are tender.
Video
Nutrition Information
Nutrition information provided is an estimate and will vary based on cooking methods and brands of ingredients used.
Course Soup
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This is our favorite hamburger soup recipe. I wondered with diced tomatoes AND tomato soup this would be too “tomatoey” but it is not. It has a wonderful flavor. My kids will be so happy to get home from school today and find this simmering.
I used a pound of Beyond Meat plant based hamburger and a can of Progresso Roasted Tomato Soup in place of the condensed tomato soup and a 24 oz pkg of frozen mixed veggies and this soup was delicious! I was not sure if the plant based hamburger would be ok in place of real beef hamburger but it is just fine. So the recipe is vegan and I will be making it again. I make a pot of soup once a week for supper soup and salad and crunchy bread and then have lunch soup leftovers the rest of the week!
Thank you for sharing Marge!
This is a wonderful, easy recipe – but I would NOT recommend draining the fat (or certainly no more than half of it) from the ground beef if it’s 80/20 or less. You lose too much flavor, and this recipe is so large that the amount of fat split up per serving would not be so much. Otherwise it’s failsafe.
Recipe
Hi Richard, there is a recipe card that has the entire recipe. Scroll down the page, or click on the Jump to Recipe button at the top of the post to find it. You’ll find the ingredients and instructions there! Enjoy the recipe!
This soup is delicious. We loved it. My tweek on this was no potatoes, instead I used 1.5 cups of gemilli pasta, 2 tsp Italian seasoning and the tomato soup I used was a basil flavored variety. The tomatoes were Italian stewed tomatoes. These changes gave the soup a richer Italian flavor. Made some fresh biscuits to have with it .
No leftovers here!
Prep time and cook time actually matched directions. Like most soup recopies it is easy to customize and make your own. In this case I used one can of petite tomatoes and one can of crushed tomatoes instead of the 28 ounces of diced tomatoes and tomato soup. . Also, substituted one huge russet potato instead of the two smaller recommended. Couple handfuls of bowtie pasta and an extra 1/2 cup of beef broth. Definitely will add this to our meal rotation for the future. Everybody liked it, which is different and a plus in my household.
I have made this at least 10 times this winter. It’s so easy, and I can make it with ingredients I keep in my pantry and freezer. I follow the recipe to a T and don’t change a thing. Love it!
This soup is soooo good! I used one can Rotel tomatoes and one can plain diced tomatoes. I used a little olive oil to soften the onion before I added the beef to brown. Otherwise, I followed your amazing recipe. We had leftovers. The soup was even tastier the third day. I will make this recipe again… that’s for sure. Thank you!
This recipe is definitely a keeper. Easy to make and delicious. I didn’t have tomato soup so I used tomato sauce instead. Next time I may increase the hamburger to 1 1/2 pounds as my husband likes a little more meat in his soup. When I told my husband I was going to make hamburger soup for dinner, he frowned, LOL. I want to share that he is on his second bowl :-) thanks for sharing a great recipe!
LOL, I just told my husband I was making this for dinner and he said “ ugh, I don’t like hamburger stew.” I think I’m going to make it anyways, as I’m sure the kids will love it. -I’ll have to let you know how many bowls he makes ;)
Yummy and delicious!
Need something easy and simple during the week
Easy. Quick.
Its cooking now!
Checked it for flavor and it’s delicious
Absolutely delicious. I made it to use up some carrots, green beans, butternut squash and chicken broth that was left over from other recipes. I made it in the 6 qt instant pot. In olive oil I used the Sauté function to cook the beef, onions, and garlic together until the beef was no longer pink. I turned off the IP, added a cup of broth to deglaze, then added the vegetables, seasonings, and remaining ingredients, adding broth last to be sure not to exceed the 2/3 measure in the instant pot, and stirred. I put on the lid, set the valve to Sealing, and chose the Manual setting for 5 minutes, followed by a 15 minute natural release.
Delicious soup and so easy to make!!
Yummy except I needed to use two cans of diced tomatoes and two cans of tomato soup, since I did a huge stock pot of this soup. Too bad I didn’t have more meat, but I did add ground hamburger and ground turkey to it but it could have used more. I also added frozen spinach to it. It’s going to be a huge hit for dinner tonight! Thanks!
I made this pretty much as written, just used a little more broth and 3 potatoes. My husband loved it and so did I.
Literally just like grandma used to make…
Out of some cans…
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that!!!
What would be a healthy substitute for tomato soup? Could I use crushed tomatoes or something like that? Thanks!
I would use either crushed tomatoes or strained tomatoes in place of the tomato soup.
Add some sugar (tablespoon or two) with the tomato sauce.(or blended can of tomatoes) when substituting for tomato soup. Tomato soup’s got sugar in it, so you need a little sugar when substituting.
I use home canned tomatoes in mine at twice the rate and exclude the tomatoe soup. But I without just take some fresh tomatoes and boil them down and add in less sodium and more flavor.
This was really really good. The tomato soup added an extra layer of flavor. Instead of potatoes I used kidney beans. Added some kale that I had to use up and a few gnocchi that I wasn’t sure what to do with. Hearty and nutritious. A definite keeper. Thanks.
I followed the recipe exactly and it was very good. I will definitely be making this again freezing the left overs if there is some next time.