Week 10: What If Soup But Fast?

This week: Techniques for speedy chicken soup, a spicy tip, an animated gif, and a Brazilian jam (musical, not culinary). Plus: the best veggie chili.

When someone’s sick you make soup. For me, as for my ancestors before me, that’s going to be chicken noodle soup, by preference starting with a whole chicken, fat carrots, egg noodles, and dill.

This takes time, though, and if you’re having a week like I am and your youngest comes down with a bad flu on Sunday (which flu the rest of us immediately started bracing for), the idea of starting a six-hour cook was totally off the table. Luckily there are two good ways to get a warm, healing chicken noodle soup on the table in less than 40 minutes.

Most commonly, you start with a grocery store rotisserie chicken. Sauté mirepoix or other vegetables while you shred the meat, then add stock (store-bought or homemade), bring to a boil, add noodles and boil, add the shredded meat, done. Top with dill, lemon zest, crème fraîche, whatever you like. Here’s a standard recipe.

This totally works and if it were easier to get a good rotisserie chicken around here I’d probably do it more often. (Costco is a very solid option, but that’s never a quick shop.)

Instead, I usually make a recipe Shannon discovered from Alexa Weibel in the Times that’s just as easy, more flexible, and texturally more interesting. It’s a straightforward technique: cook about a pound (450g) of ground chicken with some garlic. When it’s just cooked, remove it from the pot and sauté aromatics in the fat that remains. Add some herbs and spices, then add 8 cups (1.9 L) of chicken broth and bring it to a boil. Cook your noodles right in the broth, and when they’re done stir the chicken back in and you’re done.

How flexible is it? Well, we didn’t have ground chicken this week, only ground turkey. No carrots, so we used celery, shallot, and fennel. I only had about 3 cups of homemade chicken stock left, so I added a few spoonfuls of Better Than Bouillon.

I would have happily taken it in a bunch of other directions:

Sky’s the limit. With the turkey it was still delicious and Elie woke up Tuesday morning back to normal.

Speaking of Better Than Bouillon: it’s the best. Better flavor than most boxed stocks and much easier to store. Not as good as homemade but very good.

I’ve gotten in the habit of only adding most of my spices to whatever I’m cooking while I’m adding ingredients. I hold back a pinch or two to add just a minute or so before serving. With the chicken soup described above I reserved a teaspoon or so of celery seed and fennel seed to add at the last minute. It brings a brighter note to complement the more rounded flavors you get from cooking the spices into the rest of the food. Try it.

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Via Uncle Duke on Mastodon.

Via Paul Ford on Bluesky. It was a good night.

I might withdraw my endorsement of the Jaccard. Mine jammed on me Tuesday while I was making some chicken breast and in trying to fix it I put four evenly spaced punctures in two fingers on my left hand and I’m being a huge baby about it. So don’t run out and buy one and if you already have one, be careful.

I took my own advice, sort of, and made veggie chili, but I made it the Friday night before Halloween. It was so, so good—it’s an America’s Test Kitchen recipe (behind a paywall but here’s a free YouTube walkthrough) that starts with dried chilis but uses canned beans. It’s a little work and it’s very worth it. I served it with a Moroccan-style carrot salad and a bunch of chili fixin’s. And then on Halloween itself it became the basis for chili dogs.

Elie’s eats of the week: Halloween candy. Can’t argue with that.

A kitchen song is a song I like to listen to in my kitchen.

“Marinheiro Só” by Rosinha de Valença, featuring Martinho da Vila. When you need to get it in gear and just cook something.

If you have questions, complaints, or want me to explain any of the jokes, mail me at [email protected]

Simmer Down is a weekly newsletter about cooking real food at home for people who want to do that but think they’re too busy to, written by me, Yossi Langer, a busy person with kids in Los Angeles.

I don’t use AI to write or research Simmer Down, but I do use Claude to review the text for factual errors and copy mistakes. Any emdashes are my own. I also use Claude to generate an SEO summary for the web version. This is not a statement of belief, just a personal preference: I’m writing this because I like to write. Mistakes are mine.