With the weather cooling down just about everywhere now, it's getting to be soup season! Let's see your favorite soup recipes! (Some debate about whether chili is "soup"... we'll consider it soup for this thread!)
I'll start. This one started out as one of Emeril Lagasse's recipes for chicken noodle soup, but I've changed quite a bit since finding it.
- 1 whole chicken
- 1 quart chicken broth or chicken stock
- 2 quarts water, or more if you like more broth in your soup
- ~ 6 celery stalks
- ~ 6 large carrots
- 2 onions
- fresh parsley
- a big ol' bunch of mushrooms...I've made it with morels and chicken of the woods in the past, but the big container of portobellos from Sam's works. Remember that once cooked, mushrooms will shrink down to about 1/3 of their pre-cooked size, so use a good bit more than you think you should.
- 4 large cloves of garlic, at least
- butter...at least a half stick
- 4 cups (uncooked) rice - I just use Minute rice usually, but have also used wild rice. Mmm mmm! 4 cups uncooked is about the right amount for a whole pot once cooked. You may use more or less depending on how much you put in each bowl.
- Salt and pepper to taste
Making the stock: Pour the chicken broth over the chicken in a large pot. Add two quarts water - I just fill up the chicken broth container twice. Quarter 1 of your onions and drop it in along with half of your carrots and celery. I usually cut the carrots and celery stalks into thirds on a diagonal cut (probably doesn't matter, but I think the diagonal cut gives more surface area for flavor to escape into the stock). Remove the leaves from 8 or 10 parsley stems and set them aside, putting the stems themselves into the pot. Simmer everything on mediumish heat for about an hour and a half, or until the chicken starts to pull away from the bones.
Remove from heat, pull the chicken out of the pot and set aside to cool. Grill tongs and a fork work well for this. I usually put it on a plate then stick it in the freezer so it doesn't take forever to cool down.
Fish out the onion, carrots, celery, and parsley stems and discard - they make great compost! A slotted spoon works well here, but do as you like. The original recipe called for straining the stock through cheesecloth to get everything out - I don't do this because 1) It's an enormous pain, and (mostly this) 2) All the bits that end up in there from the stock making process are what makes it REAL stock! We're making homemade soup from scratch here. If you want clear "perfect" looking broth, buy your soup in a can.
While the stock is simmering: Dice up the other onion and remaining carrots and celery and set aside. Shred the parsley leaves into fine pieces and set aside. Dice up the mushrooms into manageable pieces and set aside. I usually have 3 containers for this (the reason why becomes clear shortly): one holding the mushrooms, one holding the onions, celery, and carrots, and one holding the parsley.
The soup itself: Once the chicken is cool (or using forks if you can't wait), shred the chicken and put it into the stock you made above. You'll want to discard the skin as the soup ends up with plenty of chicken "flavor" from the stock making process. The skin that remains is not easily edible and has an unpleasant texture.
I add the garlic at this point - A garlic press is a wonderful thing to have in any kitchen, but you can dice or mince it if you'd rather. Just make sure not to have large chunks in there as you want the flavor to get into the stock and getting a bite of a garlic chunk could be shocking! You could add the garlic when you make the stock if you wanted, but for some reason adding it at this point seems to work out better. I think the chicken skin and discarded stock veggies soak it up and you don't get enough garlic flavor.
In the meantime (I'll often do this while I'm waiting for the chicken to cool), you can start sauteing the mushrooms in butter a large skillet. Once the water is mostly cooked off, add the carrots, celery, and onions. I generally add some more butter at this point because the mushrooms soak it up. Saute the mushroom, onion, carrot, and celery mixture on medium to medium-high heat until just before the onions start to carmelize - you can tell as they'll start to get a little shiny and translucent.
Crank the heat up as high as it will go. As soon as the skillet gets really hot, quickly de-glaze the skillet with a ladle-full or two of stock. I do this with everything still in the skillet. This short period of high heat will cause the onions to just start to carmelize and add a very light brown to the carrots and celery - perfect for soup in my opinion! If you let the onions carmelize fully, the flavor will be quite a bit different (not bad, just different).
After the big sizzle from adding the stock, use whatever spoon you've been using to stir everything to scrape up the little charred bits in the bottom of the pan. Most of this releases as soon as you put in the ladle of stock, but make sure to get the rest. These bits are full of flavor! You can turn this skillet off once you're satisfied you've scraped up everything off the bottom.
Return the stock (which now has all of the shredded chicken and garlic added) to the stove over medium heat and add the contents of the skillet. I generally get it back on the heat sometime before I've finished the sauteing and de-glazing procedure to get it warmed up and ready to simmer again. Not necessary, but saves some time.
Simmer until the carrots and celery become tender then remove from heat. Add salt and pepper (fresh ground is best!) to taste, and sprinkle the shredded parsley on top. Make sure to add the parsley after you've removed the soup from the heat. We're just sort of "blanching" it here -- you don't want to simmer the parsley as it loses its texture and flavor then.
The rice: At some point during the process, make up your rice according to package instructions and set aside. If it's Minute rice, it's 1 cup of water to 1 cup of uncooked rice. Bring the water to a boil, remove from heat, stir in the rice, and cover.
To serve: Ladle the soup over some of the rice in a bowl and enjoy!
A couple comments/tips:
- If your stock pot isn't quite big enough (mine isn't) and seems a little full at first, lay a wooden spoon across the top of it to prevent boiling over. This is a trick my wife taught me, and it really works!! The pot is the fullest at the very beginning.
- If you like more broth, you can add more water at the beginning or go ahead and add some after you've removed the chicken. Beginning is best, though!
- The large quantities of mushrooms and garlic seem weird, right? Don't leave them out! I think they are the two things in here that are really different from other chicken soups, and they are absolutely what sets it apart. Leave either out and you've messed it up big time - particularly the garlic. I suppose I could understand if someone just really hates mushrooms, though they really do add a lot as well. Don't knock it 'til you try it!
- As you can probably tell, there's quite a bit of juggling that happens here. It can be time consuming your first time through if you don't cook a lot, but with a little bit of planning and common sense you can multitask and whip this together pretty quickly.
- Probably common sense, but be careful with the salt. It does take a good bit because there's no salt "naturally" in this aside from the butter unless your quart of chicken stock is pre-salted, but remember that you can't take it out once it's in there! This soup likes a lot of pepper, but you may want to take it easy on that too in case someone doesn't like it. You can always add more when you fill up a bowl.
- You could use egg noodles instead of rice if you would rather. This is actually what I used to do until we invited a friend over who was on a no-grain-except-rice diet and I found that I liked the rice better. Either way (and I think this is standard procedure for most homemade soup), do not try to cook the soup with rice or noodles in it. Rice or noodles will end up soaking up all the broth and getting mushy and gross.
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Originally Posted by jp71291
