Creamy Chicken Noodle Soup
ByStart with top quality chicken bone broth (we make our own) and vegetables sauteed in butter. Add half-and-half for the tastiest creamy chicken noodle soup. Filling, comforting, unforgettable.
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons butter
- ¼ cup finely sliced celery
- ¼ cup chopped bell pepper
- ¼ cup chopped carrot
- salt
- pepper
- 8 cups chicken bone broth (see notes after the recipe)
- 2 to 3 chicken leg quarters about a kilogram in total weight
- 180 grams elbow macaroni or your preferred pasta shape
- 1 cup half-and-half
- ¼ cup thinly sliced scallions
Instructions
- Heat the butter in a thick-bottomed pot.
- Saute the celery, bell pepper and carrot with a bit of salt and pepper until aromatic, about three minutes.
- Pour in the chicken bone broth and bring to the boil.
- Wipe the chicken leg quarters dry with paper towels then slide into the boiling broth.
- When the broth starts boiling again, set the heat to low, cover the pan and simmer the chicken for 15 minutes.
- Scoop out the chicken and leave to cool on a plate.
- Turn up the heat to high and pour. Stir often during the first few minutes of cooking.
- When the broth is boiling, lower the heat, cover the pan and simmer the pasta with occasional stirring (see notes after the recipe).
- Debone the chicken leg quarters and roughly chop the meat.
- Add the meat back into the pot.
- Taste the broth (the noodles would have soaked up much of the salt at this point) and add more salt or pepper, or both, as needed.
- Continue cooking until the pasta is done (see notes after the recipe).
- Pour in the half-and-half.
- Stir in the scallions.
- Taste the broth once more and adjust the seasonings, if needed.
- Bring your creamy chicken noodle soup to a soft boil, uncovered, before turning off the heat.
Connie’s Notes
The chicken bone broth used here was made by simmering a kilogram of chicken necks with a whole onion, two cloves of garlic, two bay leaves, salt and a teaspoonful of peppercorns. As you can imagine, the chicken broth was a soup by itself already. The chicken flavor was even heightened after the chicken leg quarters had cooked in the broth.
When adding pasta to soup, we give the noodles a good amount of stirring to coax them to release starch into the broth. That starch naturally thickens the soup. We also prefer to cook the noodles beyond the al dente stage. Soft but not mushy, and still able to retain their shape when scooped with a spoon.
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