Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup loaded with vegetables and a delicious broth made from scratch! One pot…one soup!
This is a healthy, low-calorie, and incredibly flavorful homemade chicken noodle soup that’s perfect for any day of the week. You’ll be craving it frequently because both the broth and the soup are made from scratch in less than an hour!
We make this recipe a lot because it’s the tastiest and most delicious way to eat our veggies without anyone complaining. Why?.
- Broth = good.
- Chicken = fall apart good.
- Zucchini noodles can be substituted for egg noodles for a lower-carb option.
To prepare the broth for this, a whole chicken is not necessary. In this family, we take shortcuts by using skinless, bone-in chicken thighs. No skimming broth needed. No need to make a separate broth. Just one soup in one pot, and all from scratch!.
Cooking the chicken in this soup from scratch releases flavours that are far richer and more delicious than simply tossing in leftover cooked chicken or shredded rotisserie chicken at the end.
When adding a few chicken thighs (or legs), the extra time spent boiling them and extracting their flavor consistently outperforms using store-bought broth.
How To Make Chicken Soup
To begin, we make a basic Soffritto (also known as mirepoix or sofrito). Also know as the holy trinity of cooking. A simple combination of three aromatics:
To create the flavor foundation for this soup, all three are sautéed together.
To make a filling and savory soup, use chicken legs or thighs. In comparison to white meat (breast), the darker meats and bones have a stronger flavor, making for a richer, more flavorful broth. When your soffritto is cooked, add them in with your broth (or stock).
An optional addition that gives your broth a lot of flavor is crushed bouillon. If bouillon is not available, substitute regular stock powder or leave it out!
After the chicken is cooked through and falls off the bone, shred it with forks and return the meat to the soup.
How to Make Chicken Noodle Soup
Get ready to make some delicious homemade chicken stock. There are two methods you can use: the long version or the short version. If you have a few extra hours to spare, the lengthy version—which you can read about in detail in my post about making homemade chicken stock—is definitely worthwhile because it’s kind of like making bone broth. Fortunately, there’s a simplified version that takes just 45 minutes. The outcome is a delicious poached chicken and hearty broth that are ideal for shredding.
Use a combination of dark and light meat that is skin-on and bone-in. While dark meat, which has a higher fat content than breast meat, will not dry out in the boiling water, the bones and skin will give the broth flavor and depth. You could even use a whole chicken.
If you’re short on time, purchase good-quality store-bought broth. Try using store-bought chicken stock or bone broth if you don’t have the time to prepare your own stock. Storebought chicken broth is typically less flavorful.
Allow the veggies time to cook slowly before adding broth. Chicken noodle soup has its own version of a mirepoix, which is a basic vegetable base made from finely diced vegetables (the mix of vegetables will vary by country and cuisine) that I mentioned in my recipe for jambalaya. It’s important to cook these veggies slowly and lowly. Instead of caramelizing, this sweetens and gives the food that delicious brothy flavor.
Season as you go. I begin seasoning everything with salt and continue all the way through. I season the vegetables, the stock, and the finished product with salt. Salt is your friend here. Having said that, each person will have a different need or desire for salt, so use caution when adding it. When it comes to black pepper, I hold off on adding it until the veggies have begun to soften.
Don’t forget about herbs. You’ll see that I didn’t use a lot of dried or fresh herbs. That’s because this is a very basic recipe for chicken noodle soup, which is also how I usually like my soup. Having said that, I always garnish each bowl with fresh parsley and add a couple of bay leaves to the broth. Don’t be afraid to experiment; fresh chives and thyme make excellent additions.
In a different saucepan of salted water, cook the egg noodles. This is the reason why cooking the noodles directly in the soup will cause them to retain the stock after they are done cooking.
