Made some yesterday from mostly scratch(used premade broth). I’d never made chicken soup before, but I think it turned out pretty ok. Looked at plenty of recipes before deciding to just strike out on my own. One thing I added that I didn’t see in any of the recipes I looked at was ginger, crystallised ginger to be specific. That was what I happened to have on hand. It gave it a real nice little kick.
Tell me about your chicken soup.
Gotta love a nice hot bowl of homemade soup on a cold winter day.
I love soup, especially this time of year, and I often will put together a chicken soup on a weekday out of whatever ingredients I have on hand.
Sometime’s it’s a traditional style, with big chunks of celery, carrot and egg noodles. Sometimes it’s Asian style, with lots of garlic and fresh ginger, low sodium stock so I can add soy and / or fish sauce; served with rice.
I often make a chicken soup that’s probably like a tortilla soup, spicy with tomatoes and peppers added, with cumin and lime juice. This I will often serve with rice instead of tortillas for the starch, just because I don’t often have tortillas on hand.
A similar spicy soup that I sort of invented is a smoked chicken soup with jalapeños. It started as a way to use up leftover smoked / grilled chicken, but it’s very very good. In addition to the jalapeños, it has a base of diced tomatoes, celery, bell,peppers, and onion, with lime juice added at the very end. The combo of smokiness, spice and citrus makes for a very tasty soup.
And nothing wrong with using store bought stock, but homemade stock / bone broth is way good and pretty easy to make, especially if you have a pressure cooker like an instant pot. I take a couple Costco chicken carcasses I’ve saved in the freezer, throw them in the Instant pot with some raw wings (the mix of pre-roasted and raw chicken makes for the most well-rounded flavor- tip I got from another Doper in another cooking thread). Add very coarsely chopped onion, celery & garlic, thyme, black peppercorns, a bay leaf or two, and a spoonful of vinegar (the acid is supposed to render more collagen out of the bones) and fill the rest with water. Cook in the instant pot for an hour.
ETA: totally forgot chicken rice soup, with the rice cooked into kind of a porridge or congee, and lots of lemon juice added. Great winter comfort food.
Yum. Before I can get to the chicken part, maybe I’ll throw a bunch of vegetable scraps in a pot and simmer them low for a million hours. Heavy on the mushroom.
How about Chick Soup With Rice?
Frozen veg scraps (mostly mushrooms), a shallot, some sprouting garlic and a leftover half-can of potatoes at the simmer. More or less this: Basic Vegetable Broth Recipe
I’m absolutely in the Alton Brown Chicken Soup group - no chicken meat in the broth most of the time (because it often gets rubbery in ways that I dislike) but with my homemade chicken broths and stocks, plenty of chicken-y flavor in the soup. I’m planning on making a batch of my favorite chicken soup this coming weekend: Homemade chicken broth, juice of 3-4 limes (depends on the lime), 2-3 roasted red bell peppers and 1 roasted yellow onion peeled and blended together, one small jicama, diced into small cubes, couple of cloves of roasted garlic, smashed, simmered until the cubes start to soften, in crocks, topped with cilantro, thin sliced jalapenos, and some crumbled cotija.
If I want chicken meat, I’ll just do some salsa-marinated chicken to go with and avoid the rubbery texture I dislike.
Of course, I still have plenty of matzoh ball mix in the pantry… but at the cost of eggs these days…
I went with noodle just because I wasn’t in the mood for rice. Didn’t think about cooking the chicken in the broth, instead I cooked the chicken in a pan with a little olive oil and some garlic, then cooked about half my onion in that pan and then heated some broth in the pan and put it all in the pot. Cooking raw chicken in water always has a smell that is unappetising to me.
I can have trouble with the Instant Pot for this reason. Great stews and soups, if I can get past the boiling raw meat smell.
My broth tastes pretty good. I’m letting the vegetable steep as it cools enough to go in the fridge.
My “base” is always homemade chicken stock (I try to keep a few quart-sized bags in the freezer at all times), diced carrots, diced onion, and diced celery. If I’m starting with raw chicken I’ll sear/brown it first, remove it from the pot, then cook the mirepoix in any chicken fat that rendered out. I’ll probably add a few cloves of minced garlic for 30 seconds or so, then deglaze with a little white wine (if there’s some open) or a little stock if no wine. Add stock, season with salt, pepper, and some combination of sage, thyme and rosemary, bring to a simmer, then cook until vegetables are the consistency I want.
Bring to a boil, add noodles and cook until about halfway done (we like to use Reames frozen egg noodles; they’re closer to a dumpling texture. Add chicken and simmer until everything finishes cooking. If I’m using leftover chicken then I wait until the noodles are done and then add the chicken to warm up; don’t want to overcook it and make it tough.
Season to taste. I usually like to add a splash of soy sauce or Worcestershire sauce - they add some nice umami notes to the finished product.
Chicken (or turkey) soup is one of my favorite parts about the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays!
I never would have thought of Worcestershire sauce. That actually sounds pretty tasty. I’m going to have to remember that, I’m going to make the soup again in a week or so, working on MY recipe for it.
This sounds really good and I’m filing it away in the memory banks to make sometime, but wow, the juice of 3-4 limes? When I add citrus to a soup, I use the juice of usually only one lemon or lime and add at the very end, after taking the soup off the heat, to preserve the brightness of the citrus flavor. If I did that with 3-4 limes it would be overwhelmingly tart and citrusy. With all that lime juice, do you add it earlier to let it ‘cook in’ more?
Haha, whenever I make chicken stock in my Instant Pot, my wife will wrinkle her nose and say “it smells like chicken farts”.
I just threw together some pantry items and a few vegetables for an Emergency Pantry Chicken Soup. Made broth from Better than Bouillion. Sauteed finely chopped celery/carrot/onion in butter, added the broth, a can of chicken from The Dollar General, and a handful of tiny pasta. Added a few seasonings, and it was delicious (for what it was). I’ve done basically the same with a packet of Lipton Noodle soup as a base, too.
It and soy sauce are my secret weapons for many soups and stews. It’s that last little something that adds a surprising depth to a soup or stew. I’ll use fish sauce occasionally, but its…funk doesn’t always play well with other flavors. I mostly use that for SE Asian-ish dishes.
The limes I find in the store tend to be smallish and dry, so 3-4 is for me, but also in part to offset the sweet that comes from several roasted red bell peppers, which tend to be pretty sweet! The nice thing about lime juice is that it’s not hard to add more, either during tasting or via wedges while serving. And of course, I mentioned I’m using homemade broth and stock, which is much heavier than a store-bought stock. I’d absolutely drop at least one lime if using store-bought. Generally, I add the lime in stages, one at the beginning (paring knife to skin the lime, throw the denuded lime in with the roasted peppers and onion when they go in the blender), and another once everything gets to temp. The last 1-2 are either for flavor adjustment (not tart enough) or into wedges for tableside adjustment as I said.
-nods-
For Asian inspired soups, sometimes I add just a teaspoon of good quality fish sauce for the “funky” flavors. Fish sauce varies from extremely funky to … complex… often depending on the brand. I’ve been reasonably pleased with Red Boat fish sauce that I got from Whole Foods, complex, but not overpowering in small amounts.
Years ago I figured out that noodles or rice should be cooked separately. Place some in a bowl and add the soup on top of it. This means no soggy pasta or rice reheated in the pot. It ups your game significantly.
Coconut aminos is good if someone can’t have soy.
A few drops of Black Garlic Umami Sauce is powerful and terrific in a soup that needs an umami kick.
Something that crossed my mind while thinking of the thread. For me, the essence of a good chicken soup (noodle or not) is the broth used to make it, with everything else being secondary. That doesn’t mean the secondary elements are unimportant but that if the broth is thin and light, it’ll never achieve what I want, thus my very strong preference for homemade broths/stocks.
I do know that having the kitchen space for a pressure cooker, slow cooker, or even a stockpot is not a given, but still, it hurts each time I see a recipe for a great soup (beer cheese, wonton, ramen, etc) that spends time about how to not skimp on X, Y, or Z, but the base broth is something like “4 cups of chicken or vegetable broth” and at most say something like “homemade is best but you’ll be fine with [[product placement]]'s bone broth”.
Yeah, I know that’s how a lot of them get paid, but…
Yes! The only starch that can be added to a soup, chowder or stew from the start that will not absorb a bunch of liquid and get soggy the next day is cubed potatoes.
I love working up broth, veg or meat.
I made chicken noodle for the recent cold snap. I started with 1/2 a Costco rotisserie chicken. Removed as much of the meat as I could easily get to, and pressure cooked the carcass and carrots, onion, and celery trimmings for an hour. Removed the solids and I have a nice pot of stock. I cooked diced carrots, onions and celery in the stock. Cooked the noodles seperately. To eat I put the cooked noodles and chicken in the individual serving bowl, added the stock with veggies and heat. That way the noodles don’t get mushy and the chicken doesn’t get rubbery.
StG