Using a good-tasting chicken broth in your cooking can help ensure a better result, even when it’s just a bit player. And when it’s the starring ingredient, as in soup, the broth you use can make or break the final dish.
But store-bought chicken broths range widely in quality and flavor, and if you’re staring at an aisle’s worth of options in the supermarket, deciding on the best one can be daunting: Labels and ingredient lists can tell you only so much, and a higher price doesn’t necessarily translate to better flavor.
We tasted and ranked 15 nationally available chicken broths and stocks with less than 150 milligrams of sodium per serving. Why did we stick to low-sodium varieties? Well, you can always add salt to a dish, but you can’t remove what’s already there. The broths ranged in flavor from insipid to full-bodied, and some of the broths we tasted had strong off-flavors, like burnt onion, or had a mysterious acidic tang. The broths that ranked the highest smelled and tasted the most like a bowl of chicken soup.
Also, quality aside, a broth may be good for some recipes and not others. For example: A more robustly flavored chicken broth adds welcome richness to stuffings, braises, and hearty stews, but it’s probably too heavy for a bright spring vegetable dish. We noted the applications we thought best for the broths that reached the top of our list.
Here is our ranking of low-sodium chicken broths and stocks (prices may vary from those we’ve listed).
