Substitute for canned soup in recipes [Archive]

Gaelen

10-16-2006, 02:54 AM

Hi, Cora. There are a couple things that you can use in place of standard cream of mushroom soup for recipes.

If you're not a purist, and you can get Campbell's Low Sodium Cream of Mushroom soups in your area, one can is only about 20g ECC. In the context of an entire recipe, that's very do-able; if the recipe serves four, the entire can only adds about 5g ECC to each serving. However, not every supermarket chain carries all four 'Low Sodium' Campbell's soup varieties, and their LS Cream of Mushroom isn't available everywhere.

This recipe has been floating around the internet since I've been low carbing; I have from in a free, downloadable cookbook called "Diana's Cookbook" that used to be linked off the old eatprotein Protein Power website. That reminds me, I keep meaning to .pdf that file and reduce its size so that it can be attached for download here. Anyway, with kudos to Diana, and to Dottie who built the recipe...where and whoever you are.

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DOTTIE'S CREAM OF MUSHROOM SOUP FOR RECIPES -- 8g protein, 9g ECC per batch
8 small mushrooms, chopped, 3 ounces
1 stalk celery, chopped
2 tablespoons onion, chopped, about 1 ounce
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup chicken broth
3/4 cup heavy cream
Salt and pepper, to taste
Xanthan gum, optional *

In a medium skillet, sauté the mushrooms, celery and onion in the butter until soft. Add the broth and cream. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat a bit and cook until reduced and thickened, stirring frequently and watching closely so it doesn't boil over. Season to taste. Note from Gaelen: this takes about 20-30 minutes to reduce to about half the original volume; make it in a heavy pan and be patient! I just reduce it; I never use the xanthan gum. If you double the recipe, you can freeze half to have on hand.
Makes about 1 cup

* If you have some xanthan gum on hand, you can very lightly sprinkle a little over the soup just as it starts to thicken and quickly stir it in, adding a little more if needed until the soup gets thick to your liking. You may need to let it stand a minute to let the xanthan gum start to work before adding more. I found that this addition helps to stabilize the soup. Another benefit of adding the thickener is that you won't have to reduce the broth and cream quite as much so you'll end up with more soup for no extra carbs.

Per batch: 873 Calories; 90g Fat; 8g Protein; 11g Carbohydrate; 2g Dietary Fiber; 9g Net Carbs

This makes a very rich, tasty sauce that would be nice over all kinds of things, like chicken, meatballs, fish, vegetables etc. After adding the cream, make sure you simmer it long enough so that the cream is no longer white and takes on the light brownish color of the mushrooms. If you can afford the carbs, a few more mushrooms would be even better.
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Hope this helps! BTW, you can use cream of mushroom soup or Dottie's recipe in recipes that call for cream of chicken or cream of celery soup--just add a chicken boullion cube to Dottie's recipe to make cream of chicken, or 1/2 teaspoon ground celery seed (more to taste) for cream of celery. You can also substitute actually finely chopped celery for the mushrooms, but you must saute the celery longer (celery has more water in it than the mushrooms and will take longer to reduce.)