Luby’s is a cafeteria-style restaurant known for their home cooking. You can make their famous beef tortilla soup at home with this easy copycat recipe.
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What Makes Luby’s Beef Tortilla Soup
Beef Tortilla Soup is an all-around crowd-pleaser. It has a kid-friendly spice level but still enough flavor to keep things interesting for adults.
This soup is perfect for taking along to a potluck or church dinner. Serving with a few extra garnishes on the side will allow folks to customize the soup to suit their taste.
Why You Should Try This Recipe
Most recipes for Tortilla Soup contain chicken, but using ground beef in combination with the chicken stock in this recipe creates deeper, more complex flavors that are still not too heavy.
Stop spending all day simmering soup on the back burner when you can prepare Luby’s Beef Tortilla Soup in about 20 minutes!
Ingredients For Tortilla Soup With Ground Beef
For this recipe, you’ll need:
- Chicken stock
- Whole peeled tomatoes, canned
- Ground cumin
- Garlic, minced
- Salt
- Ground black pepper
- Cream-style corn
- American cheese, shredded
- Cornstarch
- Water, slightly below room temperature
- Ground beef
- White onion, chopped
- Tortilla chips
Use cream-style corn in this recipe. Canned or homemade cream-style corn will taste great, but make sure you don’t pick up creamed corn by mistake. Creamed corn contains dairy, while cream-style corn does not.
How To Make Easy Tortilla Soup With Ground Beef
To make this Beef Tortilla Soup recipe:
- Pour the chicken broth into a large stockpot and bring it to a boil.
- Dump the whole canned tomatoes and the juice from the cans into a mixing bowl. Use your hands to crush the tomatoes into small pieces.
- Add the hand-crushed tomatoes to the chicken stock.
- Season the soup with cumin, garlic, and ground black pepper. Add the cream-style corn and shredded American cheese.
- Stir well and return the soup to a boil.
- Dissolve the cornstarch in a bowl of slightly below room temperature water to make a slurry.
- Stir the slurry into the soup.
- Reduce the heat until the soup is at a slow simmer, and cook uncovered for ten minutes.
- While the soup simmers, you have time to brown the ground beef and cook the onions in a pan over medium-high heat. Make sure to fully cook the meat before draining.
- Add the drained ground beef and onions to the soup.
- Stir well. Top with tortilla chips and serve immediately.
Recipe Variations
Feel free to make a few changes to the recipe. Here are a few suggestions you may want to try:
- Double the amount of ground beef for a heartier soup. You can also use other ground meat such as turkey, chicken, or bulk sausage.
- Toss in a can of strained pinto beans before simmering the soup. If you mash half of the beans, you won’t have to add the cornstarch.
- Use beef stock for a meatier flavor.
What Can You Top Beef Tortilla Soup With?
This soup will go great with just about any of your favorite burrito or taco toppings. In addition to tortilla chips or tortilla strips, try garnishing your soup with chopped onions, shredded cheese, pickled jalapeno slices, salsa, sour cream, sliced avocado, and guacamole.
Add a dash or two of hot sauce for a bit of heat. Of course, you can’t forget a squeeze of fresh lime juice to really bring out the flavors of the soup.
What To Serve Beef Tortilla Soup With?
While this soup is light enough to get away with serving a cup as a starter, you can quickly turn this recipe into the main course by serving a bowl of it with crusty bread and maybe a side salad.
How To Store Leftovers
Cool the soup down as quickly as possible and then transfer it to a clean storage container with a lid. You can refrigerate the soup for up to three days or try freezing it for up to two months. Thaw frozen soup overnight in the fridge before reheating.
What’s the Best Way to Reheat Tortilla Soup?
The best way to reheat easy tortilla soup with ground beef is in a saucepan on the stovetop over medium-low heat. Reheat the soup slowly while stirring. You can thin out the soup by adding a little more chicken stock.
Love Soup? Try These Recipes!
- Campbell’s Vegetable Beef Soup
- Chicken Pot Pie Soup
- Chicken Tortilla Soup
- Clam Chowder Soup
- Cream of Celery Soup
- Cream of Vegetable Soup
- El Torito’s Tortilla Soup
- Enchilada Soup
- Gnocchi Soup
- Panera Potato Soup
Favorite Mexican Recipes
Check out more of my easy restaurant soup recipes and the best Mexican food recipes on CopyKat!
Luby’s Beef Tortilla Soup
Ingredients
- 3 quarts chicken stock
- 22 ounces whole peeled tomatoes canned 1 1/2 cans
- 2 3/4 teaspoons ground cumin
- 1 teaspoon minced garlic
- 1 tablespoon salt
- 2 1/2 teaspoons ground pepper
- 12 ounces cream style corn
- 2 1/2 cups shredded American cheese
- 1/2 cup cornstarch
- 1 cup cool water
- 1 pound ground beef
- 1/3 cup chopped onion
- tortilla chips
Instructions
- Bring broth to a boil in a large pot. Crush tomatoes by hand and, along with juice, add to broth. Add cumin, garlic, salt, pepper, corn, and cheese. Bring to a boil again.
- Dissolve cornstarch in a cup of cool water in a small bowl. Add to boiling soup slowly while stirring constantly. Let simmer 10 minutes. While soup simmers, saute ground beef in skillet with chopped onion.
- Drain off any grease. Turn soup off and add cooked beef mixture. Serve with sour cream, shredded cheddar cheese, and tortilla chips.
KAt
This is very close to the actual recipe. I have it from the cookbooks and also when it was printed in the San Antonio Express-News. The only thing this recipe is missing is the thickener. While the original appears to be half this recipe it has most of the same ingredients. The original calls for making your own tortilla strips from corn tortillas. It’s worth it as they are so fresh and flavorful. The thickener is 1/3 cup corn starch and 1/4 cup water. Also top with 1/4 cup chopped cilantro. It also has uncooked corn tortillas in the soup.
Luby’s Tortilla Soup
Vegetable oil 1 ½ cups shredded American cheese*
4 corn tortillas, cut in 1×3” strips 2 tsp. cumin
½ pound lean ground beef 2 tsp. salt
1/3 cup finely chopped onion 1 tsp. pepper
6 cups chicken broth 1 small clove of garlic, minced
1 (14 ½ oz.) can whole peeled tomatoes, 1/3 cup corn starch
Undrained and chopped ¼ cup water
1 can (12 oz.) cream style corn ¼ cup chopped cilantro (optional)
In small skillet, heat about ½” oil. Add half the tortilla strips and cook until crisp. Drain on paper towels.
In small skillet, brown ground beef with onion, drain.
In large saucepan or dutch oven, combine broth, tomatoes, corn, cumin, salt, pepper, and garlic. Bring to a boil.
In small bowl, mix cornstarch and water until cornstarch is completely dissolved. Gradually add to boiling soup, stirring constantly. Reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes. Remove from heat. Stir in ground beef mixture, cheese and uncooked tortillas.
Ladle into bowls. Garnish with fried tortilla strips and, if desired, cilantro.
8 servings
* in place of American cheese you can use shredded cheddar or fiesta style shredded cheese.
nobruh
it was good:0
Liz Nelson
This was so good!