Homemade Chicken Soup (from Leftovers!)

Since we were in kind of a rush to get the food out on table at the Fall Feast, my really good friend left some meat on the roast chicken carcasses. At the end of the night, I sealed each carcass in a gallon ziploc bag and tucked them both into the refrigerator. Chicken carcasses are perfect for making chicken soup! And I love to make chicken soup, even when I’m not sick or when it isn’t freezing outside. There are so many good memories wrapped up in the family recipe for chicken soup – time with my Italian grandmother, time with my father, even my time in Texas – that I can’t help but smile every time I work through the recipe.

Starting the Soup

When I finally had time to go grocery shopping, I bought the ingredients that I was missing for chicken soup: two containers of carrot and celery sticks, one can of diced tomatoes, two packages of chicken thighs, two cartons of chicken broth. I didn’t really need the chicken thighs because I had the carcasses, but they were on super sale and I like extra meat in my soup. I also didn’t really need the extra cartons of chicken broth – I had a carton and a half at home – but I had a coupon for them. Besides, it is more flavorful to use broth than water.

My red cast iron enamel soup pot was not going to be big enough to hold the two chicken carcasses, so I opted to start the soup in an aluminum stockpot. At first, this went swimmingly. After I finished slicing a sweet onion, I heated enough oil to cover the bottom of the pot over medium low heat. When that seemed warm, I added the onion and the rest of the jar of minced garlic that I had been hiding in the refrigerator. It didn’t seem like enough garlic, but it was more than half a jar, so I let it be.

While the onions and garlic cooked in the olive oil, I started to chop the celery and carrot sticks. Nothing precise or pretty – just a rough chop to get them to soften up during the cooking process. Of course, I wasn’t done with my chopping by the time that the onions were sufficiently soft and translucent; therefore, I added what I had and kept adding the remainder in stages. Once all the vegetables were tossed in, I added the spices by the palmful. Since I knew this was going to be a large batch, I wasn’t afraid of overseasoning it. I even used all three bay leaves to finish the package. They were small! After the vegetables and spices were in the pot, I put a lid on it and literally walked away so that the vegetables could sweat for about 20 minutes. At the end of their sauna session, there was a nice liquid on the bottom of the pot.

Problems with the Soup

Then the problems started. I knew the pot might be tight so I decided that I was going to skip the searing step and add time to cooking in the broth. I opened one package of chicken thighs and, one by one, I pulled off the skin and nestled the thigh on the bottom of the pot. I didn’t fuss with cutting into cubes or breaking bones as I usually do because of the carcasses. I essentially repeated the same steps when I opened the next package: one by one, I pulled off the skin and created a second layer of chicken thighs at the bottom of the pot.

It became pretty obvious at this point that the carcasses were probably not going to be fully submerged in the broth in this pot, but I went ahead and added the broth anyway. I finished off open carton of vegetable broth and added one full carton of chicken broth. That brought the fluid level to almost the rim of the pot, but the carcasses were still sticking out.

I let it go for about ten minutes to see if the process of coming to a boil would open up some room to let the ingredients shift so the carcasses could submerge. Eventually, I lost patience and decided to transfer everything to the giant aluminum stockpot that I use for canning. I moved the carcasses first, and then I poured out the contents of the stockpot. I was shocked to see everything that burned to the bottom of the pot! Especially since I had it on low heat. Oh well, that was a mess that I could clean up later. Fortunately everything fit in the giant aluminum stockpot with plenty of room. I added another carton of chicken broth to cover the carcasses. Then I waited for the contents to come to a boil, lowered heat to prevent scorching, and walked away for 90 minutes. After 90 minutes of simmering, the soup looked and smelled delicious. However, it was already too late to have chicken soup for dinner. So I let it set to finish the next day.

Finishing the Soup

The last steps of making chicken soup are always both nasty and tedious because they involve fishing out all the chicken bones, fat, and meat of the soup and separating that into the trash and a container for the refrigerator. This batch of soup presented two extra challenges: first, it had so much collagen in it that it had solidified into a gelatinous mass in the refrigerator; and second, the carcasses had disintegrated. The first challenge was fairly easy to deal with. I put the entire giant stockpot back on the stove and heated it just enough to melt the mass back to a liquid state that would allow me to separate out the meat and the undesirable solids destined for the trash. The fact that the carcasses had disintegrated was truly a challenge. I thought that I could simply lift the two carcasses out of the pot and discard them. That wasn’t going to happen. All the extra meat fell off the bones and all the collagen dissolved so that the carcasses were just a pile of small bones that needed to be picked out of the soup. It was messy, but I did my best! There was still a lot of slivers of meat floating in the soup that couldn’t be separated out, but I got all the large chunks of meat, along with all the large and medium bones. Most of the small bones were removed, but I couldn’t be sure what was left behind. Fortunately, the chicken thighs stay fairly intact and were easy to remove, strip the meat from, and toss the bone.

Once all the meat and bones were out of the soup, I took an immersion blender and pureed the remaining liquid and solids. Usually the remaining solids are just vegetables, but this time there was so much leftover chicken in the soup that the soup actually turned whitish instead of orange. Of course, I used to do this step by pouring the hot chicken soup into a traditional blender, which was both messy and dangerous. Thanks to the discovery of the immersion blender in my cabinet, I no longer have to worry about burning myself in the process of transferring hot soup from one container to another.

The Verdict

Despite all the drama toward the end of the soup making process, the soup turned out excellent. I was very happy with it, and very happy to have a simple nutritious dinner ready to go for several days. This probably wasn’t my best batch ever, since I like mine to be on the vegetable rich side, but recycling the carcasses was definitely a positive learning experience.

The Recipe

Chicken Soup
Make this on a dreary day, and freeze in small containers for a quick cure if a cold strikes.

1 head garlic, peeled and smashed
1 yellow onion, thinly sliced
10 oz bag carrot sticks, chopped
10 oz bag celery sticks, chopped
2 bay leaves
palmful of coarse pepper
palmful of rosemary
palmful of fennel seed
palmful of kosher salt
approx 2 lbs chicken thighs
½ 14 oz can diced tomatoes
2 qt water or chicken broth

1. Heat olive oil to medium in large soup pot. Sauté garlic and onion until translucent.
2. Add carrot, celery, bay leaves and spices. Toss with garlic and onion. Reduce heat to low. Cover and sweat until soft, about 20 minutes, shaking occasionally.
3. While vegetables are sweating, remove excess fat from chicken. Cut meat from bones. Slice meat into cubes. Break bones open to expose marrow.
4. Increase heat to medium. Add chicken. Toss to sear chicken on all sides, about 10 minutes.
5. Cover with water or broth. Add tomatoes. Raise heat to high and bring to rolling boil.
6. Reduce heat to low and simmer about 45-60 minutes.
7. Degrease. Remove solids.
8. Puree at least half of the vegetables (NOT the bay leaves) and return to pot.
9. Pick chicken from the bones. Add chicken back to pot or serve separately.

Dad’s Easy to Follow Directions:
♥ Use 2lbs chicken breast and 2lbs wings/legs
♥ Use marinara sauce instead of diced tomatoes
♥ Leave skin on chicken parts, but kosher and rinse well before simmering
♥ Add everything whole or quartered, instead of chopping and slicing
♥ Pick out the chicken and grind all the vegetables back into the soup