Why Broccoli Cheddar Soup Is the One Fall Dish I Never Get Tired Of

The first properly cold evening of fall shows up and I want exactly one thing.

Again.

I’m not proud of the repetition. Every fall I tell myself I’ll branch out, and every fall I end up standing over the same pot of broccoli cheddar soup like it’s a standing appointment.

Here’s the awkward part for somebody who writes about vegetarian food. The bowl most people picture when I say “broccoli cheddar” is one I won’t eat.

The famous one has chicken in it

Go read the tub of Panera broccoli cheddar at the grocery store. The ingredient list starts with milk, and the second thing on it is chicken stock.

It isn’t hiding behind “natural flavors” either. It’s spelled out, with chicken meat and chicken fat listed right there in the brackets.

Broccoli comes fourth, after milk, chicken stock and water. In a soup with broccoli in the name, the broccoli lost to water.

I’m only talking about the take-home version, because that’s the label I actually read, and I read it this month. Recipes change, so look at the one in your hand.

What gets me is how loved this soup is. Food Network Magazine once reported that Panera ladles out more than 50 million cups of it a year. And when Tasting Table polled 515 people in 2022, 39% picked it as Panera’s best soup, with second place way back at 17%.

I’d bet a lot of those people think of it as vegetables and cheese. I get why. Nothing about a bowl of green and orange says poultry.

The rest of the label is the useful bit. There’s Dijon mustard in there, and hot pepper sauce, which explains that little tang you can’t quite place.

None of it needs a chicken. Vegetable broth does the same job, and that’s what goes in mine.

Broccoli is actually at its best right now

Soup weather isn’t the only reason this is a fall dish. Broccoli is a cold-weather plant that hates summer about as much as I do.

Summer heat hurts the head while it’s forming. That’s why growers pick slower varieties for the fall crop, so the heads come in when it’s cooler.

And it doesn’t quit when the weather turns. Broccoli keeps growing after the first light frosts, which is more than I can say for my motivation to cook anything else.

Michigan State’s extension people go further. They say mature fall broccoli can take temperatures down to 25°F, and that the cold makes Michigan broccoli much sweeter than what comes out of warmer places like California.

I can’t promise that about every head at the supermarket. It’s sold all year and it comes from everywhere.

But I love the idea that the vegetable and I are on the same schedule. It shows up when I want soup, and I want soup when it shows up.

Yes, I’m boiling the vitamins out. They’re still in the bowl.

Somebody always wants to tell me I’m ruining the broccoli. They’re not totally wrong.

Raw broccoli is ridiculous on paper. A cup of it chopped is about 31 calories, with 81 mg of vitamin C and 92 mcg of vitamin K. That’s roughly 90% of a day’s vitamin C and 77% of the vitamin K.

Then you cook it. When researchers ran broccoli through five home cooking methods, steaming was the only one that didn’t cost it a significant amount of vitamin C.

So no, my soup isn’t raw broccoli, and I’m not going to claim it is. Heat takes its share no matter what.

Here’s my one smug point though. Vitamin C dissolves in water, so some of what leaves the broccoli ends up in the liquid.

With soup, the liquid is the point. I’m not pouring it down the sink.

When the soup goes grainy, I check the heat first.

Too much heat can turn smooth cheese soup grainy.

Cheese is fat and water held together by protein. Hit it with too much heat too fast and the protein tightens up and clumps, and you get strings and grit where you wanted something smooth.

So I take the pot off the heat before the cheese goes in. Low and slow, and I don’t argue with it.

I also grate my own, and I’m annoying about it. The bagged stuff is dusted with anti-caking powder, often cellulose, which is basically wood pulp.

It’s fine to eat. It just shows in the pot, where the cheese sits there partly melted like it’s thinking it over.

Read the cheddar label too, because cheese isn’t automatically vegetarian

This is the part that surprised me more than the chicken stock. The cheese can be the problem.

Cheese gets made with rennet, the enzyme that sets milk into curds. Traditionally, rennet comes from animals.

A lot of commercial cheese has moved on from that. The common alternative now is made by fermentation, no animal involved. But the traditional versions of some famous cheeses still use the animal kind, and traditional cheddar is on that list along with Parmigiano Reggiano and Gruyère.

Good luck telling which is which from the package. Most labels just say “enzymes.”

The Panera tub does exactly that. Its cheddar reads “Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes,” which tells me nothing about where the enzymes came from.

So I go to the brand. Sargento, for one, says most of its natural cheeses are made with non-animal rennet.

It also names the exceptions, like Romano, Provolone, Asiago, Fontina, blue and feta. I wish every company answered the question that plainly.

Do you have to care about this? No. Plenty of vegetarians don’t think about rennet at all, and I’m not here to audit anybody’s fridge.

It’s just a thing I check. If I’m going to the trouble of keeping the chicken out of the pot, I’d like to know what else got in.

I’m not going to pretend it’s a salad

It’s cheese soup. I know what I’m doing.

One cup of that Panera tub is 240 calories with 9 g of saturated fat and 990 mg of sodium. That’s 43% of a day’s sodium in a cup.

And who stops at a cup? The 2018 spec sheet lists the whole 16-ounce tub at 440 calories, 17 g of saturated fat and 1,850 mg of sodium. On that label, that’s 81% of the day’s sodium, gone before the bread shows up.

I’m not judging the tub. I’d just rather be the one holding the salt.

I’ll get bored of fall before I get bored of this

So the most famous broccoli cheddar on the shelf has a chicken in it, and the cheddar might have its own secret.

Mine has broccoli, cheese I grated like a crank, and broth that never met a bird. Same pot, every fall, and I’m not sorry.