Healthy Instant Pot Meatball Soup

Easy Instant Pot meatball soup made with homemade or frozen meatballs in under 20 minutes flat! A healthy low carb and keto friendly dinner you’ll love. 

• We love this healthy meatball soup when it is chilly outside!

Now that we’re trying to incorporate more low carb soups into our diet, this one has been a fave.

To make things easier (and under 30 minutes) we use frozen meatballs so it can be made in under 20 minutes flat. That’s my kind of semi homemade dinner.

Meatball Soup Recipe

We always incorporate ALL the vegetables we can, especially when it comes to Instant Pot soups. Use what you like, or swap out those you’d rather have inside really.

Instant Pot Meatball Soup

1. Frozen meatballs
   1. you could make them homemade beforehand
      1. use ground beef or ground turkey to make Italian meatballs
   2. or make air fryer meatballs

Note: if you do NOT use frozen meatballs, you need to add them at the end once the soup is done cooking. If not they’ll fall apart.

1. Carrots
2. Broth 
   1. either chicken broth or beef broth, your choice

1. Olive oil
2. Onion
3. Celery
4. Garlic
5. Tomato sauce
   1. crushed tomatoes could be used as an alternative
6. Salt and pepper
7. Basil
8. Parsley

Unlike our Instant Pot Italian wedding soup recipe we did not add any pasta or noodles to this one to keep it keto.

If you wanted to add some you’d need to cook it 3 minutes shorter, release steam, add noodles and add 3 more minutes with a quick release.

How come I don’t I add raw homemade meatballs into the mix? Because they tend to fall apart in the cooking process. If you don’t want store bought, just bake beforehand.

Why do my meatballs fall apart when cooking?

The binder is usually the problem if they do. Most meatball recipes call for using bread crumbs and eggs. Too many bread crumbs makes them loose, but not enough bread crumbs won’t help them hold together either.

• Adding homemade meatballs into liquid like this doesn’t seem to work real well as far as them staying in tact. Using frozen eliminates this issue, so that’s my preference.

How long do you brown meatballs before putting in sauce or soup?

Give them a minute or two on each side to fully brown. Then finish cooking them in the oven.

Here are some simple step by step directions. I also have a printable recipe card at the bottom of this post.

Serve in bowls alone or with parmesan cheese on top. I have yet to make this in a slow cooker, but our easy Italian wedding soup is pretty close.

I’ve made another version using ground sausage where I didn’t form them into balls at all. I just browned it on saute and left it as it. That worked well too.

• If you’re interested in that version you can try this Instant Pot sausage soup with kale. It’s another one of our favorite comfort foods.
• This Instant Pot minestrone soup is packed with vegetables with pasta too if you want another simple dinner idea.

What should you serve with pressure cooker meatball soup?

1. Our favorite is probably this semi homemade garlic pull apart bread.
2. You can also make this easy roll recipe.
3. Garlic bread goes well with just about anything.

Printable recipe is below with nutritional information including saturated fat and calorie content.