Campbell’s recipe is for the ‘easy as pie’ crowd
Six ingredients. Three steps. Campbell’s chicken pot pie passes the eye test for easy.
The only potential trouble I spy with my amateur chef’s eye is spreading a biscuit mixture over the filling. Will the dough sink during the spreading process?
Moving past easy to tastier concerns, the recipe flavor hinges completely on cream of chicken soup, biscuit mix, chicken and vegetables. No added seasoning. That’s a recipe for taste buds playing a game of “Where’s Waldo?” Except the search is for flavor instead of weird looking fellow in a red-stripped shirt.
It’s time to play No Budget Cooking Series to see if Campbell’s chicken pot pie proves easy to make and its tastiness.
Insights
The biscuit mix topping looked great and baked evenly all the way through without creating any gooey mush where it contacted the filling. Folks who like a lot of pastry enveloping their pot pies might be disappointed in the amount of “crust.”
Out of laziness I super sized the filling. I didn’t measure the chicken or vegetables. Using an entire 12.5-ounce can of white chicken meat, which is closer to 2 cups, an entire 16-ounce bag of frozen vegetables, which is more like 3 cups, yielded plenty of chicken and vegetable flavor.
Still, this dish is best suited for the spice-averse or those who like mildmannered foods. That, apparently, includes folks in the Higgins Eats household because there were no leftovers of this chicken pot pie. After a couple of bites, I added a few twists of fresh ground black pepper to my serving.
I had the frozen vegetables out for about 15 minutes before I started making this recipe. I don’t know if I would say they were completely thawed when I stirred them into the filling, but they
were cooked through during the allotted 20-minute baking time.
I whisked the milk and soup together until it was smooth before mixing in the chicken and vegetables. The extra step added maybe a minute of prep time, but I think it helped create a more uniform sauce. (At least that’s what I’m telling myself.)
My inadvertent supersized filling may have made it easier to spread the biscuit mixture over the top. If you go big with filling, bump up the size of the pie tin or pan. I used a 9.5-inch Pyrex pie pan and it barely contained the contents.
Put the pie tin on a cookie sheet in the oven to catch overflows.
It’s a good base recipe that’s easily adaptable to fit personal tastes by your choice of mixed vegetables or adding a dash of black pepper or other seasonings.
Next time I might even get super fancy and try brushing melted butter over the finished crust.
ABOUT THIS SERIES: Daniel Higgins tests recipes found on food packages. Follow @HigginsEats on Twitter and Instagram and like on Facebook.