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This easy-to-make Creamy Green Chile Chicken Soup is perfect for a hearty dinner or for meal prep! With green chiles, salsa verde, chicken, and veggies it is comfort food, lightened-up.
It’s also gluten and dairy-free, even though you would never guess it!
Green Chicken Chile Soup
This Creamy Green Chile Soup is pure comfort food in a bowl. Mexican inspired flavors like green chile, salsa verde and lime are combined together in an easy to make soup. We’re opting to use cashew cream to make this soup creamy without any cheese or dairy, and it really brightens the whole thing up.
This soup is perfect for use of leftover chicken or shredded rotisserie chicken to make this a weeknight dinner meal. And, you can add on your favorite toppings to customize it!
What You Need to Make It
Scroll down for the full ingredient list!
- Cooked Shredded Chicken (see notes below)
- Canned Green Chiles
- Store-bought Salsa Verde
- Lime Juice
- Onion
- Green Bell Pepper
- Carrots
- Potatoes
- White Beans
- Chicken Broth
- Salt + Cumin
- Cashew Cream (see notes below)
- Avocado
- Cilantro
What Type of Chicken to Use
This recipe calls for cooked shredded chicken. You can use a rotisserie chicken, leftover chicken from another meal or if you need to cook it from fresh use this recipe for making shredded chicken in the Instant Pot or slow cooker!
TIP: Or if you didn’t want to make a separate recipe, you can also dice up the chicken breasts and brown it first, then start from step 1.
Easy Button!
Grab a rotisserie chicken from the store!
How to Customize It
As with all soups, it’s pretty easy to customize what’s in this soup!
The important flavors in this are the canned green chiles and salsa verde. So try not to skip out on those. But the veggies, potatoes and beans are pretty easy to swap in what you have on hand! Need to switch up the beans or omit it? That’s fine, too.
You could also add in other veggies to suit your tastes such as:
- Corn
- Green beans
- Different peppers
- Zucchini or Summer Squash
Want to make this a plant-forward dish?
Skip out on the chicken and bulk up on the veggies!
What is Cashew Cream?
This soup uses our favorite dairy-free trick of adding cashew cream to make it creamy, without any added dairy. Cashew cream is simply soaked cashews that are blended until they are smooth and creamy.
We love that it tastes delicious, is simple to make and adds more nutrition in the form of healthy fats and protein, to the soup.
P.S. You make it yourself! Follow my guide on How to Make Cashew Cream!
Want To Use Dairy?
Don’t have a problem with dairy or don’t want to use cashew cream? Simply replace it 1-1 with heavy cream!
What to Serve with this Soup
You can totally add on what you want here!
These are some of my favorites:
- Tortilla Chips
- Plantain Chips
- Diced Avocado
- Additional Salsa Verde
- Scallions
- Shredded Cheddar Cheese
- Pickled or Fresh Jalapeno
- Cilantro
Can This Soup be Frozen?
We don’t recommend freezing this soup because of the added cashew cream.
If you wish to freeze it, do so without the cashew cream.
Once you heat it back up from frozen, then you can add in the cashew cream/heavy cream. Check out this Freezer Meal Guide for more tips about freezing foods.
More Soup Recipes
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Creamy Green Chile Chicken Soup
Ingredients
- 2 teaspoons olive oil or avocado oil
- 1 medium onion diced fine
- 1 green bell pepper diced
- 2 carrots diced fine
- 2 medium yellow potatoes peeled and diced to ½” piece
- 1 4 ounce can mild diced green chilis
- 1 15 ounce can cannellini beans, rinsed and drained (optional)
- 1 cup store-bought salsa verde
- 2 cups cooked shredded chicken rotisserie chicken works well here
- 6 cups chicken broth
- 1 teaspoon sea salt
- 1 teaspoon ground cumin
- ⅓ cup cashew cream or heavy cream
- 1 tablespoon lime juice
- 2 avocados diced
- ¼ cup minced cilantro
- Sliced limes for garnish
Instructions
- Heat the oil in a large dutch oven. Once hot add onions, peppers, carrots, and cook, stirring occasionally, until very softened, about 10 minutes.
- Add in the potatoes, green chiles, beans, salsa verde, shredded chicken, broth, salt and cumin and stir together. Bring up to a boil and then reduce heat to simmer until the potatoes are tender and the soup has slightly reduced, about 20-25 minutes.
- Stir in the cashew cream, lime juice and cilantro. Taste, and adjust the seasoning, adding in more salt or lime juice as needed.
- Serve hot with desired garnishes.
We made this last night and it’s 10/10 delicious! Our 2 year old even loved it!
Maybe the best soup I have ever made! Thanks for a fantastic recipe….
I made it exactly like the basic recipe and then added extra vegetables as you suggested, one diced zucchini, a can of drained hominy (I like it better than corn in Mexican soups), one tired diced poblano and one tired jalapeno from my refrigerator. I also added more chicken (again, cleaning out the refrigerator). Heavy cream and an entire lime at the end. We topped it with some crisp tortilla strips, an avocado, some chopped green onion and cilantro. Honestly – I am so happy to have a ton of leftovers!
This recipe is categorized under vegan, but it has chicken and chicken broth in the ingredients list.
See the section “want to make this a plant-forward dish”! easy recipe swaps to make it vegetarian (veggie stock and no chicken).
Made this tonight – exactly as recipe indicated (with heavy cream). Excellent! Will def make again!
Made this tonight – exactly as recipe indicated! Excellent! Will def make again!
This was sooo delicious and super easy to make! We added more veggies and green chiles than it called for (we needed to use them before they went bad!), it was perfect! I also used heavy cream instead of cashew cream since we already had an open container in the fridge. Next time I think I will try it with the cashew cream.
We will definitely be making this again!