An easy and delicious creamy potato soup recipe that can be made in just one pot! Loaded with bacon and creamy potato goodness, this is a favorite comfort food in my household.
Something savory today!
Savory, creamy, and loaded with bacon, sour cream, and cheese. You guys already know that we don’t exactly do health food around here, right? 😉
Even when I’m not sharing desserts, the food is always comfort food, and that’s usually best served with extra cheese (have you tried my baked mac and cheese yet!?) and usually comes with a few calories. Let’s not think about that too much, alright?
I know I mentioned to you guys that I had this potato soup recipe for you back when I posted my Oreo Balls; I made it when Zach had a bad cold and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since (you might think that’s an exaggeration, but I can assure you that my food obsessions run deep… Please see photo below to understand why).
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Zach prefers to eat healthy most of the time (I pretend that I do, too, but really if I lived alone I’m pretty sure I’d eat creamy cheesy foods every night and never fit through any doors ever again), so the soup was a good break from baked chicken breast, but this definitely isn’t an every night kind of meal in our house.
Potato soup is definitely on the menu for this weekend, though… it’s so frigid outside I’ve convinced myself that I need soup, specifically creamy potato soup, to survive. Potato soup makes me dramatic, evidently.
If you’re in the midst of a cold spell yourself (or even if you’re not) I think you’re going to enjoy this creamy potato soup as much as we do. Read on for some tips on how to make it!
Tips for Perfect Creamy Potato Soup
- Cut your potatoes into pieces no larger than ¾″ and try to keep them around the same size so that they cook at the same time. Nothing worse than biting into a crisp, raw-inside chunk of potato!
- To make this soup nice and creamy, I recommend pureeing about half of it either by using an immersion blender or by transferring a portion of the soup to a blender, pureeing, and then stirring the pureed soup back into the pot (maybe you recognize this technique from my corn chowder). If you want a completely smooth soup you can puree all of it, but I prefer to have a few actual pieces of potato, so I think pureeing half gives it the best taste and texture.
- Don’t return the bacon to the pot until after you have pureed some of the soup. It’s best not to blend the bacon 😉.
- The ancho chili powder is, in my humble opinion, a must and gives this soup the most perfect depth of flavor. I blend it into the potato soup and also sprinkle it on top before serving. I recommend adding just a ¼ teaspoon and then taste testing before adding more.
This would make a great comfort food for this cold and windy weekend (is there anything more cozy than a pot of soup simmering on the stove while the wind is howling at your window? Anything!?), and while I don’t follow football at all I do know that this would be great to make ahead and enjoy during the big game this weekend.
Who really cares about football when you can make yourself a Super Bowl of soup! 🤣😂 OK OK I’m sorry, enough of that!
Enjoy!
How to Make Potato Soup
The Ultimate Potato Soup Recipe
Ingredients
- 6 strips (uncooked) bacon cut into small pieces
- 3 Tablespoons butter unsalted or salted will work
- 1 medium yellow onion chopped (about 1.5 cup/200g)
- 3 large garlic cloves minced
- ⅓ cup all-purpose flour (42g)
- 2 ½ lbs gold potatoes peeled and diced into pieces no larger than 1” (this was about 6 Large potatoes for me/1.15kg)
- 4 cups chicken broth (945ml)
- 2 cups milk (475ml)
- ⅔ cup heavy cream (155ml)
- 1 ½ teaspoon* salt
- 1 teaspoon ground pepper
- ¼ - ½ teaspoon ancho chili powder**
- ⅔ cup sour cream (160g)
- Shredded cheddar cheese, chives, and additional sour cream and bacon for topping optional
Recommended Equipment
Instructions
- Place bacon pieces in a large Dutch Oven or soup pot over medium heat and cook until bacon is crisp and browned.
- Remove bacon pieces and set aside, leaving the fat in the pot.
- Add butter and chopped onion and cook over medium heat until onions are tender (3-5 minutes).
- Add garlic and cook until fragrant (about 30 seconds).
- Sprinkle the flour over the ingredients in the pot and stir until smooth (use whisk if needed).
- Add diced potatoes to the pot along with chicken broth, milk, heavy cream, salt, pepper, and ancho chili powder. Stir well.
- Bring to a boil and cook until potatoes are tender when pierced with a fork (about 10 minutes).
- Reduce heat to simmer and remove approximately half*** of the soup to a blender (be careful, it will be hot!) and puree until smooth (half is about 5 cups of soup, but just eyeballing the amount will be fine. Alternatively you can use an immersion blender.).
- Return the pureed soup to the pot and add sour cream and reserved bacon pieces, stir well.
- Allow soup to simmer for 15 minutes before serving.
- Top with additional sour cream, bacon, cheddar cheese, or chives. Enjoy!
Notes
Nutrition
Nutritional information is based on third-party calculations and should be considered an estimate only. Actual nutritional content will vary based upon brands used, measuring methods, cooking method, portion sizes, and more.
Nancy King
I have leftover russets and want to make this without heading to the store. Has anyone tried this with russet potatoes?
Sam
Hi Nancy! My mom makes it with russets all the time, you won’t have any problem. Enjoy! 🙂
Sandy
So good! I needed to use up fresh stuff from Thanksgiving so made this. I did add some cheddar since I had a ton and diced up a couple of carrots. I’ll b making this lots.
Michelle B
My go to recipe for potato soup, wouldn’t use any other. Delicious!
Jen
Loved this soup!! I wouldn’t change a thing, it was perfect!! Recipe was easy to follow and it will be one I make over and over during the cold winter months.
Heather-Laurel
Love the recipe – posted comments already but forgot a comment on potatoes…
After some stuff I’ve read I’m trying to only buy organic potatoes, but there was such a price difference between the red and yellow that I used red potatoes (after asking the grocer if they’d still be good in soup!). Since they were organic I did NOT peel them (only one where the skin looked a little funny). There is so much nutrition packed right under the skin, plus it adds fibre. You wouldn’t have known the peels were there (not that I’ve had minded, but some people do) because I pureed it all. I recommend never peeling unless potatoes are really old and skins very thick. Even then, scrub well so most of the skin comes off and you save all the nutrients near the surface.
Heather-Laurel
I’d give it a 4.5, but that wasn’t an option and didn’t want to downgrade this great recipe! For making a potato cream soup for the very first time, the basics of this recipe were EXCELLENT. Perfect consistency. My son doesn’t like the texture of potatoes (unless they’re french fries!) and I was making it for him while he had the flu, so I pureed all of the potato. Because I was going to have hot soup in a blender (and have had disasters with that in the past!), I made the soup without the milk until I was ready to blend, and only added it to the stuff I put in the blender to help cool it a little. I would’ve liked more complexity in the flavours so I added a fair bit of thyme, paprika and pepper. I didn’t have her particular chili which might have had some of that, but I added a good number of shakes of cayenne. Can decrease the calories with a thick, yogurt instead of sour cream. Not the season for chives, so I sprinkled it with parsley and that added good flavour too! I did find it a bit salty – guess it depends on your chicken stock, but cheese adds to the salty too, so keep that in mind when flavouring!
Colette
This soup is amazing! Every time I make potato soup I use this recipe!
I love it! 🙂
Sherry Gilbreath
Made for my sister and she bragged and bragged on it. Great recipe.
Jamie
Hi Sam!
Have you tried freezing this soup? Wondering if it would still taste ok after being frozen and then defrosted?
Thanks!
Sam
Hi Jamie! I have not personally frozen it. I would be worried about separation occurring.
Jackie
I made this the other night because I wanted comfort food. It is delicious! Even my 4 year old granddaughter, who doesn’t like potatoes, ate it up! I will definitely be making this again.
Christy
If you freeze it, don’t add the milk or cream (unless you use skim milk). Add the milk and cream to it when you reheat it.
Kailyn
Is there a way to make this without the heavy cream? I have all other ingredients and went to three different stores and they were out of heavy cream 😭
Sam
Hi Kailyn! You could use more milk if you can’t find heavy cream. Your soup will just be a bit thinner. 🙂
Michael Sloboda
In the printed recipe you state 10 min foil and then 15 min simmer, in the video you say 10 min boil, 30 min simmer, and then 15 min simmer after blending.
Can you help clear this up
Sam
I’m sorry for any confusion, Michael! When in doubt it’s always best to follow the written recipe. Simmering the soup longer won’t hurt it at all, in fact it may help with the flavor a bit. 🙂
Heather-Laurel
Hey Kailyn,
You can add 10% cream. Just add more of the cream and less milk (i.e., an extra 2/3 c cream and 2/3 c less milk). Or add a bit of butter. You can even do it all with whole milk – it will just be less creamy. A lot of people prefer less fat so they avoid heavy cream. We made this on the same night! I used a high fat yogurt because I didn’t have sour cream, and it was great! I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.
Rob K.
I just used different ratios of half and half cream with milk to get close to the same thickness. I have no complaints about the result!
Mikaela Knotts
Hi there! I had no heavy cream so just completely skipped it and didn’t even add extra milk and it still came out perfect! 🙂
Loy Moore
Made this for the first time for a work pot luck. It was a HUGE hit and I went home with an empty crock pot!
Meghan
Could this be made in an insta pot and pressure cook it?
Emily @ Sugar Spun Run
Hi Meghan! We haven’t tried making it this way, but other commenters have. If you want to search through the comments (the search function on your browser should find it quickly), you can see how they did it. 🙂
Anji
Do you have to purée the soup? I’ve never done it and I don’t have a blender 😑
Emily @ Sugar Spun Run
Hi Anji! You don’t have to, but if you wanted to you could use a potato masher 🙂
Ken
This soup is amazing! I increased the bacon to 8 strips (you can’t go wrong with more bacon), doubled the garlic, and since I didn’t have ancho chili powder I used chipotle chili powder. The extra garlic and the heat from the chipotle chili powder added a nice kick to the soup, it’ll knock a cold right out of you.
Emily @ Sugar Spun Run
We are so happy you enjoyed the chili, Ken! Thanks for the review 🥰
Mary Lovill
We made this today for supper, and followed the recipe as written and it was amazing!!!! Thank you so much… I just printed it out so I will have it. Thank you so much!
Emily @ Sugar Spun Run
Thanks so much for the review, Mary! We’re so happy you loved the soup 😊
Pamela
Yummy! My husband and I made this for lunch today. I used a vegetable base instead of chicken broth and added the bacon after my vegitarian son took his out. Very delicious and hardy!