How To Make Chicken Vegetable Soup

Chicken vegetable soup is the plainest thing on this site and the one most worth getting right, because almost everyone makes it and almost nobody makes it well. Done properly it is clean, golden, deeply savory, and light enough to eat a large bowl of. Done the usual way it is pale, watery, and tastes mostly of celery.

Difficulty is easy. About two hours if you poach a whole bird, forty minutes if you take the shortcut below.

The difference between the two versions is one decision: whether you use a whole chicken. A whole bird gives you meat and stock from the same pot, in the same two hours, for less money than boneless breasts cost on their own. Boneless breast gives you meat and nothing else, which is why soup made from it needs stock from a carton and still tastes thin. The bones are the recipe.

This is also the lightest soup in this collection by a wide margin, and the only one with no cream, no cheese, no cured pork and no potato.

This makes four generous servings.

Equipment

Three pieces do the work here, and I stock all three.

• 5 Quarts Round Dutch Oven with Lid. A 4 pound chicken needs to sit submerged with the lid on, and five quarts is the smallest size that manages it comfortably. Poach the bird and build the soup in the same pot.
• Digital Meat Thermometer with Long Probe. Poultry is the one place where doneness is a safety question rather than a preference, and 165F is the number. Color is not a reliable indicator, and a long probe reaches the innermost thigh, which is the last part of a whole bird to come up to temperature.
• Two-Tone XL Cutting Board, 18 by 12 Inch. A whole chicken needs room, and raw poultry needs its own surface. Cross contamination from raw chicken and its juices is the main food safety risk in this recipe, and it happens on cutting boards more than anywhere else.

You will also need a fine mesh strainer, tongs, and a ladle. Poultry shears make jointing a raw bird much easier and I do not currently stock them, so I will not pretend otherwise.

Ingredients

For the chicken and stock

• 1 whole chicken, about 4 pounds
• 1 large onion, halved, skin on
• 2 medium carrots, halved
• 2 ribs celery, halved
• 10 cups cold water
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 teaspoon black peppercorns
• 4 sprigs fresh parsley, stems included

For the soup

• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1 large onion, diced
• 3 medium carrots, diced
• 3 ribs celery, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 sprigs fresh thyme
• 1 cup green beans, cut in 1 inch lengths
• 1 cup frozen peas
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice
• Salt and black pepper, to taste
• Fresh parsley or dill, chopped, for serving

Method

Before you start

Set up your mise en place. Dice the soup vegetables and have the strainer and a large bowl ready. Keep the raw chicken and everything it touches separate from the diced vegetables.

Do not wash the chicken. Rinsing raw poultry does not remove bacteria, and it splashes them onto your sink, counters and nearby food. Only cooking destroys them. This is the single most common unsafe habit in home kitchens and it is worth breaking.

Start the bird in cold water. Put the chicken in the pot and cover with cold water, not hot. A gradual rise in temperature draws more gelatin out of the bones and keeps the stock clear, while dropping a bird into boiling water seizes the proteins and clouds it immediately.

Poach the chicken and make the stock

Bring it to a bare simmer, never a boil. Add the halved onion, carrot, celery, bay, peppercorns and parsley stems. Bring it up slowly until the surface just trembles, with a bubble breaking every second or two. A rolling boil emulsifies fat into the liquid and turns the stock cloudy and greasy, and once that has happened you cannot undo it.

Skim the foam in the first ten minutes. Grey foam rises early. Lift it off with a spoon. That is coagulated protein and it will cloud the stock and taste faintly muddy if you stir it back in.

Poach for about 1 hour. The chicken is cooked when the innermost part of the thigh reads 165F on a thermometer and the juices run clear. Check the thigh rather than the breast, because it is the slowest part of the bird to come up.

Lift the bird out and let it cool. Set it on a board or in a wide bowl until you can handle it. Leave the pot simmering while you work.

Pick the meat and return the bones. Pull all the meat off and shred it into bite size pieces. Cover and refrigerate it. Then put every bone and scrap of skin back into the pot and simmer another 45 minutes. This is the step that separates good chicken soup from ordinary, because the first hour cooks the bird and the second hour builds the stock.

Strain and skim. Pour through a fine mesh strainer, discarding the solids. You want about 8 cups. If you have time, chill the stock and lift the solid fat off the top. If not, skim what you can from the surface with a ladle.

Build the soup

Sweat the diced vegetables. Melt the butter in the cleaned pot over medium low heat. Add the onion, carrot, and celery and cook until softened and translucent with no color, about 10 minutes. Browning here would push a clean soup toward a roasted one.

Add the garlic and thyme. One minute, no longer.

Add the stock and simmer. Pour in the strained stock and simmer gently for 15 minutes, until the carrots are tender but still have a little resistance.

Add the green vegetables late. Green beans first for 4 minutes, then the peas for 2. Both go in near the end so they stay bright and keep their texture. Green vegetables simmered from the start turn olive drab and lose the freshness that makes this soup worth eating.

Finish and serve

Return the chicken off the heat. Stir in the shredded meat, cover, and take the pot off the burner for 2 minutes to warm it through. It is already cooked, and simmering it again is what makes chicken in soup dry and stringy.

Season, then add the lemon. Salt and pepper to taste, then the teaspoon of lemon juice. That lemon is the step almost every recipe leaves out and the one that makes the difference. A long-simmered chicken stock is round and slightly flat, and a small amount of acid lifts the whole pot without making it taste lemony.

Serve. Ladle into warmed bowls with plenty of parsley or dill.

Whole chicken, thighs, or breast

Whole chicken is the right answer and it is also the cheapest. A 4 pound bird costs less than two pounds of boneless breast in most shops, and it gives you roughly a pound and a half of meat plus eight cups of stock. Nothing else on this list does both.

Bone in, skin on thighs are the best shortcut. If you do not want to deal with a whole bird, use about 2 1/2 pounds of bone in thighs. They carry enough bone and connective tissue to make a decent stock in an hour, and thigh meat holds up far better in soup than breast because the extra fat and collagen keep it moist even if you overshoot.

Boneless breast is the worst option here, and it is what most people use. No bones means no stock, so you are buying it in a carton. And breast is very lean, which means it goes from done to dry in a couple of minutes and then turns stringy in hot liquid. If breast is what you have, poach it gently for 15 minutes, pull it at 165F, shred it, and add it off the heat at the very end.

A mixed bird is ideal if you are jointing your own. Breast for texture, thighs and drumsticks for flavor, back and wings straight into the stock. The chicken butchery guide covers jointing a whole bird in eight cuts, which takes about five minutes once you have done it twice and saves you money every time after.

Adding noodles or rice

Both work and both have the same trap, which is that they keep absorbing liquid after cooking.

Cook them separately and add them to the bowl. This is the single best piece of advice on this page for anyone planning leftovers. Boil the noodles or rice in their own pot, put a portion in each bowl, and ladle soup over. The soup stays soup, and day two is not a solid block.

If you cook them in the pot, accept the consequence. Egg noodles need 6 to 8 minutes in the simmering soup, added just before the green vegetables. Long grain white rice needs about 18 minutes and should go in with the stock. Either will swell overnight and thicken the soup considerably.

Quantities. 4 ounces of dried egg noodles or 1/2 cup of raw rice for four servings. Both roughly triple in volume.

For a gluten free version, rice is the obvious choice, or use rice noodles cooked separately and rinsed.

Using a rotisserie chicken

This is the honest weeknight version and it takes the recipe from two hours to about forty minutes. It is a real compromise, and it is also what I would do on a Tuesday.

Pull the meat and keep the carcass. A rotisserie bird gives you roughly 3 cups of meat. Strip it, then break the carcass up.

Make a 45 minute stock from the carcass anyway. Simmer the bones with an onion, a carrot, a celery rib and 8 cups of water. It will not match a two hour stock from a raw bird, but it is dramatically better than a carton, and it costs you nothing but time you were spending anyway.

If you are truly short of time, use 8 cups of good low sodium chicken stock and skip the carcass step. Buy low sodium specifically, because rotisserie chicken is already heavily salted and the soup will end up over seasoned otherwise.

Taste before adding any salt at all. This is the version most likely to come out too salty, because the bird was brined and seasoned before you ever saw it.

Add the meat off the heat at the end, exactly as in the main recipe. It has already been cooked once and roasted; a third cooking will dry it out.

Make ahead, storage, and reheating

Make ahead. The stock is the part worth making in advance, and it is better for an overnight rest in the fridge, which also lets you lift the fat off cleanly. It keeps 4 days refrigerated and freezes for months. Keep noodles or rice separate.

Cool it properly. Do not leave the pot on the stove to cool. Divide it into shallow containers, no more than a couple of inches deep, and refrigerate within two hours. A large pot of stock holds heat in the middle for hours, sitting in the 40F to 140F range where bacteria multiply fastest.

Refrigerating. 3 to 4 days.

Freezing. Freezes well, since there is no dairy or potato in it. Three months. Freeze without noodles or rice.

Reheating. Heat thoroughly to 165F throughout. The chicken will firm up slightly on reheating, which is unavoidable.

A short history

Chicken soup is close to universal. Nearly every cooking culture that keeps chickens has a version, and the reason is practical rather than mysterious: an old hen that had stopped laying was tough, and long slow simmering was the only way to make her edible. The soup was a way of using the bird at the end of its working life, and the depth of flavor was a by-product of that toughness.

Its reputation as medicine is old and widespread. It appears in twelfth century medical writing, most famously from the physician Maimonides, and Jewish penicillin remains a common name for it in the United States. Some modern research has looked at anti-inflammatory effects and at whether it helps clear congestion, though the findings are modest and the evidence is thin. What is not in doubt is that a hot, salty, hydrating broth is a genuinely sensible thing to give someone who is unwell and not eating much, and that has probably always been most of the story.

The two stage method here, cooking the bird first and then simmering the bones, is not a modern refinement. It is what you do when the chicken is the only chicken you have and you intend to get everything out of it.

Nutrition, estimated

Per serving, based on 4 servings.

These are estimates calculated from standard reference values for the listed quantities, not laboratory measurements. This is by some distance the lightest soup in this collection, at roughly two thirds the calories of the chowders, because there is no cream, cheese, cured pork or potato in it. Skimming the fat off the chilled stock lowers it further. Sodium is the lowest of the set and rises sharply if you use a carton stock rather than making your own. The figure does not include any salt added to taste.

References

• Chicken from Farm to Table, USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. Why rinsing chicken does not destroy bacteria and spreads them instead, safe handling to avoid cross contamination, the 165F minimum, and refrigerator and freezer storage times.
• Doneness Versus Safety, USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. Why color and time are not reliable doneness indicators, and where to check the temperature on a whole bird.

Related guides

• How to Butcher a Chicken, which covers jointing a whole bird and what to do with each part
• How to Butcher a Wild Turkey, if you want to make this with a wild bird, where the frame makes an exceptional stock
• The Butchery Guides, all 36 of them

Thank you

Thank you for cooking this. Putting the bones back in the pot for a second hour is the part nobody photographs and the part that actually makes the soup, so if you did it, you made something better than most restaurants serve.

If you make it, I would like to hear how it went, and especially what you changed. Tell me here.

If this one worked for you, the chicken guide will teach you to joint a bird in about five minutes, which pays for itself every time you make this.

Cook Bolder, Serve Wiser, Eat Better.

Chef Alan, 35 years in professional kitchens and a six-time Four Diamond chef
Wine Drop Cookery