How To - Making Chicken Noodle Soup in the Crockpot

Making homemade soup can take a long time, but with your magic crockpot, you can get a wonderful batch of chicken noodle soup while you are taking care of other tasks. While you are out and about, your soup will be happily simmering, creating a delectable bowl of comfort. This is a meal you can easily make whether you are an accomplished chef or if you only cook when absolutely necessary. Your chicken soup will turn out much better than any canned soup you can buy.

If You Use Only the Freshest Ingredients...
If you only use the freshest ingredients, the crockpot can still make your soup easier. Remove the skin from your chicken. You can use a whole chicken, parts or boneless breasts or thighs... whichever you have handy. Put the chicken in the crockpot with enough water to cover it. You can add a stalk of celery, an onion, a carrot, and some herbs if you wish. Let it simmer on high for three to four hours.
Once the chicken is cooked, remove it and let it cool off. Strain out the vegetables and herbs you may have put in with the chicken and toss them. Remove the cooled meat from the bones and cut it into small pieces before adding it back to the broth. Add some freshly chopped vegetables of your choice: perhaps some carrots, sweet potatoes, rutabagas, celery, or other favorites. Add a little garlic and some herbs if you wish.
Leave the crockpot on high and let it simmer a couple more hours before opening the lid. Taste the broth a little less than an hour before you want to serve dinner. Add any salt that is needed. Once it tastes the way you want, add your noodles. You can use egg noodles, linguine, curly noodles, or bowties. If you make homemade noodles, you can add them about 20 minutes before you serve.
Simply Easy Chicken Noodle Soup
If you prefer to keep it really simple, here is another method. This chicken noodle soup recipe is so easy a teenager could make it. You can use leftover chicken or one of those rotisserie chickens from the supermarket.
Put the chicken in the crockpot, bones, and all. Cover with a large can of chicken broth. Simmer the soup on high for three or four hours. This will add the chicken's flavor to the commercial broth. Remove the chicken and let it cool before deboning it. Cut up the meat before putting it back in the crockpot.
Add some vegetables. You can use fresh sliced carrots or other vegetables, or you can use frozen vegetables. To make it really easy, just put in some whole baby carrots from the market. No peeling, slicing or dicing! Let the soup cook for a couple more hours.
About half an hour to 45 minutes before you want to eat, add your favorite noodles. You can use any kind of noodles you like, from ruffly egg noodles to ramen. Large ribbon noodles are fun. This is also a great way to use up small amounts of noodles in your cupboard. Mix and match if you need to. Break up some spaghetti, put in a handful of macaroni. It is your soup, do what you want!

Everyone loves chicken noodle soup. It helps us feel better when we're sick, or just feeling blue. For more inspiration, check out ChickenNoodleSoups.com for recipes, cooking tips and fun facts about everyone's favorite soup.
If you are looking for some great recipes or tips on cooking chicken soups and stews of your own, the site will be very helpful. Whether you want a quick and easy soup, a creamy one, or an old fashioned chicken stew, you are sure to find it there. Recipes like our classic chicken noodle soup recipe and many more chicken soup recipes.
If you are in the mood for chicken stew with an international, flavor our any other type of wonderful chicken soup we have a selection that is sure to fit the bill.
Nothing but chicken soups of all kinds. Also find informative articles related to chicken soup's health benefits and other interesting information like soup cooking tips.
Look for our heart health recipe guide to find soup recipes that can help you with your fight against heart disease. All recipes include nutritional information to help you make informed healthy choices about your next recipe decision.

Chicken Soup Recipe - Making Your Own

This article is not so much about my own Chicken Soup Recipe, but more about how you can develop your own unique version. I think everyone who likes to cook chicken should be able to make a good soup with it. It's a great way to use up leftovers, and an even better way to make sure you get enough vegetables in your diet.

While there are countless variations of techniques and ingredients in chicken soup, there is one constant that no one can do without: a good stock or broth. Without this your soup will have a watery taste, and that is no fun to eat. Also, a tasty broth is more likely to be healthier for you, since where there is flavor there is usually also nutrients. A good stock typically contains some gelatin, which comes from dissolved collagen from bones and connective tissue. Gelatin is great for carrying both flavor and nutrients because it can interact with organic molecules better than water can.
So does that mean you have to make your own chicken stock in order to have a good chicken soup recipe? Not necessarily, as there are many good chicken stocks available at grocery stores. I prefer the kind you get in boxes, but the canned stuff is usually good too. I'll use the powdered or cubed stuff in a pinch, but I find they have too much salt and other flavor enhancers for my liking. I'm also not sure how much gelatin they contain, if any.
However, if you do prefer to make your own stock, there are many excellent Web sites available that give instructions. Basically all you have to do is simmer chicken bones along with some onions, carrots and celery for an hour or two. Regardless of how you make it, there is one piece of advice I can give you that will always work: after the stock is made, remove the solid ingredients, and boil off some of the water to reduce the amount to half. Concentrating the stock will intensify the flavor, making everything you use it in that much more flavorful.
After the stock, your next choice is which vegetables to use. I've already mentioned the classic onion, carrot and celery mix, but there are so many other choices available. From time to time I enjoy some chopped spinach in my chicken soup, or any other leafy green I happen to have on hand. Frozen peas are another great option, but remember to add them about 5 minutes before the soup is done cooking, unless you prefer your peas mushy. Tomatoes are another great vegetable to use in chicken soup, and they have the added benefit of bolstering a weak-tasting stock. You can also use "substitute" vegetables to replace some of the classics: fennel in place of celery, leeks or shallots for the onions, parsnips for carrots, etc. And let's not forget about all the peppers out there, both hot and mild!
When it comes to vegetables, I usually just add whatever I have in my refrigerator. Any leftovers or veggies that are about to expire become candidates. I usually avoid root vegetables as they take longer to cook through, but if they are already cooked then they are fair game too. If not, then just chop them up into small pieces so they cook more quickly.
Next in the list of ingredients to select is the type of starch to add. There are so many to choose from that there is no way I could list them all, but one thing to think of is how much the starch you choose will thicken the broth. This will depend on how quickly it dissolves into the broth and how long you will be cooking it for. Most people don't want to thicken their chicken soup too much, so pasta is the usual choice for most people. If there is one variant of chicken soup that is more famous than all the others, it would definitely be chicken noodle soup.
But noodles are far from being the only choice. Brown rice is my go-to starch for chicken soup. Like barley, it will thicken a broth given time, but it normally takes more than an hour for that to happen. I like how it swells in the liquid of the soup, and how it adds just a touch of viscosity to it. It helps the flavor of the soup cling to the tongue for just a little bit, enhancing the taste experience.
Lentils are a very healthy starch to use, and there are a lot of varieties to choose from. Red lentils will practically dissolve into the soup, while the little green gems known as Puy lentils will keep their shape almost forever. At the other end of the spectrum are potatoes, which given enough time will thicken a soup enough to stand your spoon in it.
If you want to go for big-time comfort food, then dumplings should be your selection. Personally I have never made dumplings, but I know some people that swear by it.
Lastly, you need to decide what spices and herbs to go for. Chicken has such a neutral flavor that you should pay more attention to matching your spices to your vegetables you used. The basic spices that are considered "classic" would be parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme...just as in the song. These work very well when you use the classic veggies. But when you use other vegetables, then there are some really good combinations available. For instance, if you used tomatoes then you would be making a mistake to leave out the basil. Spinach and marjoram work very well together, while tarragon and fennel make a good pair.
But don't think just about spice and herbs. If you want a really refreshing flavor, add a bit of lemon juice. Don't forget about the garlic either, as it works with almost all other ingredients. And lastly, don't be afraid to add a bit of spice. You don't need to add so much that it burns the palate; just a little will heighten all the other flavors.
Of course, I'd be remiss if I left chicken itself out of the discussion. Any cooked or raw chicken will do, but you'll find that white meat is the best in soups. Dark meat, while tastier, has a much higher fat content and tends to make a soup feel greasy. White meat for soups and pastas, dark meat for everything else is the rule that I go by.
I hope you aren't disappointed that there wasn't a recipe that you could follow to the letter in this article. The truth is I don't usually cook that way anymore. I found I made much better meals once I understood the basics of whatever meal I was making I could improvise and make improvements and substitutions based on my tastes, who I was cooking for, and what I had in stock.

Erik Christensen
http://www.homemade-soup-recipes.com

Chicken Soup and Family Traditions

It's a funny thing with chicken soup. I think that the older the person and the longer that they've been making it the better it tastes. In my family I have eaten three generations of this soup - mine, my mother's, and my grandmother's. I remember telling my mother when I was young that her's was delicious but not as good as grandma's. When I would tell that to my grandmother she would say that it's not true and that my mother's soup was just as good as hers.

Then when I started making soup my kids told me that mine was good but not as good as their grandma's ( my mother's). Now my kids make this great soup, because they have their own homes, and they tell me that their soup is good but not as good as mine. But, I have tasted theirs and I told them that it's just as delicious as mine - just like my grandmother used to tell me. If you are lucky enough to have a mother or a grandmother who makes soup then give her some of your easy chicken soup to taste. I'm sure that she'll love it and say that it's as delicious as hers.
Chicken soup is very tasty when you serve it with noodles. I use egg noodles because they are fluffier than pasta noodles. You cook them in water like pasta but for a shorter amount of time. You can buy egg noodles that are fine, medium, wide or bowtie shaped. Once they are cooked and drained put some into a hot bowl of chicken soup and enjoy.
Another delicious addition to a bowl of chicken soup is a matzo ball. Unlike the easy soup recipe I don't have an easy matzo ball recipe. That is, the recipe itself is not complicated but it's not easy to get them to be light and fluffy instead of hard as a rock.

For more information about chicken soup recipes and diet soup recipes check out my hubs by clicking on the links.