By the first week of January, I'm ready for a break from all the heavy, rich foods of the holiday season and find myself craving meals with light and clean flavors. Chicken soup fills the bill perfectly.
While most years I like to experiment with those flavors, this year I think I'll stick to the classic version, with tender chicken and vegetables swimming in a thyme-scented broth. Instead, I'll experiment with the technique.
Making chicken soup should be an easy task. Sauté onions, along with carrots and celery. Add a whole chicken and fresh or dried herbs and cover with water and simmer slowly until the chicken is fall-apart tender and the broth has sapped all the flavor out of the meat, bones and skin. It's not a difficult process, but it does take a few hours to do it properly.
I was later than most to see the benefits of the Instant Pot, but over the past few years, I find myself reaching for it often to tackle things like making my own yogurt, or perfectly cooked rice at the push of a button. One of the things I think it does best, though, is broth.
Its pressure-cooking ability makes deeply flavorful, homemade broth a breeze. Why? The pressure cooker works by creating a sealed chamber, which allows steam to build as the contents are heated. As the steam builds, the pressure in the cooker increases. This pressure extracts flavor from the chicken and vegetables much more rapidly, and quickly converts collagen-rich connective tissue into gelatin, which gives the broth more body and a nice mouthfeel.
While I often use it just to make chicken broth, a lovely chicken noodle soup is also easy to achieve. The process is essentially the same, except I use a whole chicken for the soup to ensure lots of tender shreds of meat, instead of the chicken wings and backs I typically use for broth.
If I'm serving all the soup right away, I will cook the noodles with the broth in the Instant Pot. If I know I'll have leftovers, I cook the noodles in a separate pot on the stove and store them separately from the soup. This avoids the inevitably mushy noodles, which happens when they continue to soak up broth as soup sits in the fridge.
So Happy New Year, and may the coming year be filled with joy — and soup.
