If you live in the Minneapolis area in Minnesota, then you’re probably familiar with the Lunds & Byerlys chain of upscale grocery stores (or L&B for those who are in a hurry). And, if you live in that area, you’re probably also familiar with Lunds & Byerlys wild rice soup. It’s one of their most popular items.
So this is clearly long overdue, but today we’re finally going to check out the Lunds & Byerlys Minnesota Wild Rice with Chicken.
This soup is incredibly simple to cook. It comes in a pouch that can be either heated in the microwave or placed into boiling water on the stovetop for ten to fifteen minutes. We actually went with the stovetop method here and found it to be quite easy.
This comes out extremely hot, so you probably want to let it cool for a bit before you start spooning it into your face.
This soup is very creamy. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since half & half is one of the first ingredients listed on the ingredients section of the package, but it’s certainly welcome. Wild rice soup is definitely better when it’s super creamy.
The wild rice is very good. It has that rich, lake-grown taste that Minnesota-grown wild rice tends to have. This is one of those local Minnesota treats that many of our staffers have simply grown up with, and we think it’s used to great effect in this soup.
The chicken comes in cube-shaped chunks that are pretty small. They’re soft and full of flavor, so we’re not complaining. We just want to warn you to not expect giant chunks of stringy chicken in this soup, because you won’t find them here.
This soup has a big surprise inside: almonds. They’re thinly sliced so that they’re razor sharp and pokey, and L&B spared no expense when it comes to almonds here. This soup is loaded with them. We know there are people out there who love almonds, but we’re not fans of them in our soup. We could have done without this part of the dish. By the time we were about a quarter of the way into our soup, we began pulling the almonds out and leaving them to sit on a folded napkin.
One box of this soup is considered a full serving. It contains 320 calories, which really isn’t all that bad. It’s just a little outside the diet-friendly range. However, there’s also 1,370 mg of sodium in this pouch of soup. That’s almost double the amount we’d expect from a frozen food. Yikes!
If it were up to us, we’d make one change to the Lunds & Byerlys Minnesota Wild Rice with Chicken Soup. We’d get rid of those almonds. Sure, they probably add a lot of flavor to the broth while the soup is cooking, but once the soup is done they are razor-edged intruders that really prevent this soup from living up to its true potential. Everything else about this soup is top-notch.
To learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this L&B soup, check out our package scan below.
