Chicken & Garlic Soup
There’s not much need for noodles here
Soup in the spring isn’t the most obvious combination.
Time: 2 hours and 30 minutes
Difficulty:1/5
Ingredient Availability: 5/5
Soup isn’t something I crave or even think about very often. Unless someone is sick, soup rarely crosses my mind. So why did I decide to give this recipe from Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat a try in the middle of spring? Well, I knew it would probably last at least a week and require little effort. It’s really that simple. Sometimes you want to make something at the beginning of the week and not have to worry about what to eat for days.
Key Ingredients and Omissions:
The stock you use really matters.
This soup has pretty standard ingredients as far as a soup goes. There are just a couple of things I want to highlight. It would probably be ideal to make your own chicken stock from scratch, but I didn’t feel like doing the extra work to do so, even though it probably wouldn’t be too much. If you decide against making your own chicken stock, I recommend using the best quality stock you can find. The other item I wanted to highlight is the optional parmesan rind. I decided to cut the rind off of the parmesan I had to use in this recipe. I would be surprised if the end product wouldn’t be noticeably different without the rind.
Tools:
Large Pot
Cooking Review:
Prep: 34 minutes
The prep for this recipe actually stared the previous day when I broke down a whole chicken into quarters and seasoned with salt to dry brine over night. That time isn’t included in the total time count. On the day that the soup as cooked, I chopped the vegetables and sliced the garlic. The recipe calls for a lot of garlic, so that’s what took the longest In this step.
Browning the chicken: 16 Minutes (2 batches)
I hated some oil in a large pan and browned the chicken two pieces at a time. Each side was cooked for about 4 minutes before being transferred to a plate. The excess fat was drained from the pot to prepare for the next step.
Cook Vegetables and bring to a boil: 28 minutes
I added the onions, carrots, celery, and bay leaves to the hot pan and cooked for 12 minutes until softened. Once softened, I added the parmesan rind, chicken and chicken stock and brought it to a boil. While waiting for the soup to come to a boil, I heated some olive oil in a pan and added the sliced garlic until fragrant. This was then added to the soup pot.
Simmer: 50 minutes
Once the soup came to a boil, I reduced the heat to a simmer and let everything cook for about 12 minutes before removing the chicken breast. While the soup simmered for another 38 minutes, I shredded the chicken breast. After a total of 50 minutes, I removed the soup from the heat and took out the remaining chicken pieces.
Finishing Soup: 10 minutes
To finish the soup, I shredded the remaining chicken pieces and seasoned the soup to taste for the final time (be sure to add salt throughout the cooking to make sure it is well seasoned). The chicken was added to the soup and it was ready to serve.
Analysis:
The chicken flavor of this soup is very good. I think the overnight brining of the chicken paired with the choice of chicken stocks I used are to thank for this. The chicken was tender and flavorful and none of it was dry at all. The carrots, while soft, still had some flavor to them, but the celery didn’t contribute much texture or flavor. As far as the garlic goes, its flavor is clearly present, but pretty mellow compared to fresh garlic, as expected. I don’t think I’ve had a better soup. This recipe is pretty simple and I think the ingredients add up to more than what you might expect. The flavor was very clean and didn’t leave me with garlic breath or lingering flavors. I’m giving this recipe a 10/10. I really can’t think of anything that would make this any better.
