Chicken Soup
This isn’t how to make chicken soup, it’s just what I did last time I made it and it came out nice. All the other chat is at the end.
All in, this takes about 2 hours to make.
Ingredients
- Whatever’s left of your chicken carcass & any leftover meat after a roast
- Some peppercorns (6 in this instance)
- Salt
- Celery (2 stalks)
- Carrots (3)
- Pearl Barley (half a cup? Ish?)
- Butter (as much as you dare)
- Garlic (3 cloves)
- Leek (some)
- Herbs (I used dried Herbs de Province because I couldn’t be bothered to go back in the garden for fresh herbs).
Method
Get Nicola’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
First remove most of the rest of the good meat from the chicken and put it aside. Then put all the bones and skin in a big pan cover with water and add salt and the whole peppercorns.
Simmer for about an hour, and then use tongs to take out all the bits you can find. Leave them to cool.
Strain everything else that’s left in the pan through a colander into another container and pick out anything you like the look of. Discard the dregs but keep the liquid on one side, let’s call it stock now.
Chop up the celery, peeled carrots, leek and garlic however you want (I chopped the leek finely because the soup was mainly for my fussy children), and soften with some (or a lot of, in my case) butter in the soup pan over a gentle heat for a good while, so the leek and celery start to go a bit golden.
Add all the good bits of chicken you retrieved earlier, and pour in the stock. Then, when the bones have cooled down enough to handle, pick off all the good bits of meat left on the bones and add those too. You can get rid of the bones now. Also add the pearl barley. I never know how much to put in, so ‘some’ is a good amount.
Flavour according to taste — “seasoning” seems to just mean chuck a load of salt in, but obviously taste it as you go to make sure you don’t overdo it. I cooked mine for about 40 minutes (until the barley has gone soft, basically) and added some dried herbs and ground pepper towards the end.
Done.
The Chat
I hate having to scroll past all the chat at the beginning of a recipe when all I want to know is whether I have the ingredients and how long it’s going to take. Anyway this recipe is here not because I am good at cooking but because among the 2500 people telling me how they make stock (very informative, I don’t think there is any information missing here), quite a few people asked me my soup recipe. I don’t really have an exact one but I’ve typed this out anyway because this soup did turn out quite well so why not. Other soups are available.
This particular roast chicken worked out well too. I rubbed it with fresh rosemary, sage, parsley and thyme from my garden, chopped up and mixed with some crushed garlic and some slightly melted butter, and cooked it at about 150°C for the first hour and then turned the oven up to 180°C to finish it off and cook the potatoes. I use a meat thermometer so I’m not all that particular about cooking times.
I will, naturally, be upping my stock-making game next.
