Step Up Your Fall Soups With One Of Costco's Most Beloved Items

Aside from the legendary Costco $1.50 hot dog, there are few items at the warehouse club that are more famous than its rotisserie chicken. For $4.99, you can grab a 3-pound chicken to eat as-is, or fashion the tasty cooked chicken into quick meals. Here's another great idea for fall: Use rotisserie chicken to level up warming soups.

To start, let's take our popular chicken carcass soup as the base. If you've picked your rotisserie chicken (mostly) clean, you can use the leftover carcass exactly as shown in the recipe. But a whole chicken works, too — remove the meat, and throw it all together with aromatics into a stockpot. You can follow that up with either boiling water or, better yet, Kirkland's Organic Chicken Stock. The bones will deepen the flavor of the stock for a soup that's equal parts warming and flavorful.

But while making chicken soup is the obvious choice, Kirkland rotisserie chicken can be worked into so many more hearty soups than just traditional chicken soup.

Any of our soups and stews with chicken in the name are an obvious match for your rotisserie bird. But rotisserie chicken shines in other soups, too. Try adding it to our Instant Pot wild rice soup: Just toss in some shredded chicken before pressure cooking. The meat turns impossibly tender, contrasting wonderfully with the chewy rice and vegetables. Even better, those rotisserie seasonings bring extra depth, complementing the earthy mushrooms for a truly satisfying bowl.

If the weather is particularly cold and you'd like something to effectively warm you up — bringing heat to your tastebuds all at once — try our creamy taco soup. It's basically a taco in soup form, just switch the ground beef for chicken. The smoked paprika, chili powder, herbs, seasonings, corn, black beans, and cheese make a perfect pairing for the ready-cooked meat. Use an equal amount of rotisserie chicken as you would beef, or even mix-and-match the ground beef with shredded chicken for the definition of comfort-in-a-bowl.

Basically, if it's a meaty soup, there's a way to turn your Kirkland rotisserie chicken into the star of the show. Now that you know this trick, rotisserie chickens can easily carry you through the cold season — and you wouldn't ever have to eat the same soup twice if you keep on the lookout for new soups to try it with.