For A Flavorful Pasta Sauce, Reach For This Italian-Style Canned Soup

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

As of 2024, the United States is the eighth largest consumer of pasta in the world, with each American consuming over 19 pounds of pasta per year on average (per The International Pasta Organization). It's inexpensive, easy to prepare, and can serve as a blank canvas for culinary creativity — pasta goes with almost anything! However, making the sauce from scratch can be a chore. Sure, you can open a jar of pre-made stuff and call it a day, but it's not quite the same as adding your personal touch. Luckily, there's a middle path that may be your go-to solution for a quick meal: canned garlic parmesan cheese soup.

Campbell's makes this creamy condensed soup (thankfully available online at retailers like Walmart), and it almost begs for you to doctor it up with add-ins. Condensed soup is essentially a reduced version that has twice the concentration of regular soup and a thicker consistency that you can adjust with the liquid of your choice — anything from milk to broth or even booze. This canned soup is made mostly with water and just a touch of cream and contains starches to keep it stable. These features can keep your sauce from splitting when adding acidic elements, like wine or tomatoes.

Fettuccine Alfredo is the obvious choice to test out this hack — just thin it out with some pasta water, add a pat of butter, and enrich it with more cheese. You can also try adding lemon zest and juice to make a summery riff on a classic. It's also a foolproof secret for a quick and easy macaroni and cheese while its thick consistency also makes it an optimal choice for lasagna bolognese, and it works perfectly in an American-style (not Italian) spaghetti carbonara. But there are so many other applications for this product that go beyond Italian cuisine and even beyond pasta.

There are many international pasta dishes in which canned creamy parmesan soup can work fabulously. Take pastitsio, for instance, a Greek dish of tubular pasta topped with a boldly seasoned meat sauce and a layer of thick béchamel. You no longer need to whisk butter, flour, and milk over a hot stove, hoping for it to be lump-free. Simply spread a can of this condensed soup over this baked Hellenic favorite, sprinkle it with cheese, and pop it in the oven. This tip also works fantastically well with a moussaka recipe, which replaces the noodles with eggplant.

Head east from Greece until you reach South Korea, and a can of this foundational ingredient can help you whip up a plate of carbonara tteokbokki, an East-meets-West variation on a popular local street snack that you can recreate in minutes. Keep traveling east to Peru, add this garlic parmesan soup to a blender jar along with spinach and basil, blitz, toss with linguine, and you have easy tallarines verdes.

This cheesy condensed soup also works for many non-pasta dishes, including some elegant showstoppers, like coquilles Saint Jacques. This creamy scallop dish is bathed in a cheesy cream sauce and gratinéed with even more cheese, and a can of Campbell's will cut down on the labor of this classic French dish. Mixing this soup with some greens and a medley of herbs also gives you a perfect topping for oysters Rockefeller, an American classic dish that's over 100 years old. You can also mix a can with some chopped spinach and artichokes to create a restaurant-quality dip.