Hearty Homemade Hamburger Soup

This Hearty Homemade Hamburger Soup is the perfect healthy recipe for the colder months ahead. Made in the Instant Pot or on the stove, this easy, one-pot meal is made with simple ingredients, full of flavour, and has comfort food written all over it.

The calendar says it’s Fall, but we’ve already seen our fair share of Winter during October. The beginning of the month greeted us with 40 cm of snow, forcing us both to have a good ol’ fashion “snow day”. I enjoyed the unexpected day off of work by making more Homemade Instant Pot Apple Sauce (I just couldn’t help myself!) and a batch of this Hearty Homemade Hamburger soup to warm us up after shoveling all the heavy white stuff.

I swear, this soup is comfort in a bowl! Like wrapped in the warmest blanket, fireplace on, watching Netflix kind of comfort.

It’s so, so good.

The ingredients for this Hearty Homemade Hamburger Soup are simple – you probably already have everything in your fridge.

Grass-fed beef is sauteed with celery, carrots, onion, mushrooms, and garlic until the beef starts to brown and the veg starts to soften. Next in go the tomatoes, tomato paste, herbs, sea salt and pepper. All this deliciousness continues to saute until there’s some nice caramelization going on. It’s that caramelization and brown goodness at the bottom of the pot that will give this soup extra yummy flavour, so saute, saute, saute! The bone broth will help to deglaze the flavour-filled brown bits and then the rice gets stirred in. The soup will need a bit more time to cook the vegetables and rice fully, and then you can dig in!

Curt and I both love soups and stews during the colder months because they’re quick meals and the perfect way to get in a ton of veg along with a daily dose of bone broth. They also tend to be really simple to make. This recipe comes together easily in one pot! I like to use the Instant Pot to make this soup, but you can definitely follow the same recipe steps using a pot on the stove, simmering it until all the ingredients are cooked through.

Remember how we said that our favourite Fudgy Coconut Zucchini Brownies tread on the line between what would be considered brownies and what would be considered fudge? Well, this Hearty Homemade Hamburger Soup is a little unsure what whether it’s a soup or a stew. And I like it that way!

The addition of rice is what makes this tomato and bone broth based soup a thicker, more “stick to your bones”, stew-ish kind of consistency. If you’re grain free or following a low-carb or keto diet, you can omit the rice and try substituting it with cauliflower rice instead.