Vegetable and roast chicken soup

Vegetable and roast chicken soup is the pantry-style chicken soup that stretches the meat with vegetables and a light, savoury broth. By our assessment, its strongest point is that it offers more going on than plain chicken broth: roast chicken gives a deeper, cooked flavour while the vegetables add body. The trade-off is that this category often stays fairly mild, and the roast chicken note can be more about seasoning than big chunks of meat. In practice it is a heat-and-eat bowl, the sort of thing that works when lunch needs to be simple and warm rather than carefully built. Against creamier chicken soups it is lighter; against clear vegetable soups it is more substantial. That makes it useful for someone who wants a straightforward soup with a little more depth than plain vegetables, and less appealing if the aim is a rich, chunky chicken stew. The Astrina catalogue places Vegetable and roast chicken soup under chicken soups, which is the right shelf for it.