The Recipe with Kenji and Deb - Chicken Soup

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Chicken soup is the universal comfort food, but there are as many versions of chicken soup as there are planets in the universe. Depending on where and how you grew up, versions as varied as “Jewish penicillin”, phở gà, stracciatella, Campbell’s condensed all mean home to someone.Radiotopia’s fall fundraiser is here! Donate today to help us reach our goal of 2,024 donors. Thank you!

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I clear it up. Chicken noodle soup. Chicken noodle soup. Did you know that Chicken Noodle Soup is a song by American Dust Jockey, DJ Webstar and rapper Young B and it came out in 2006? I was not aware. Have you heard the song? I listened to it when I was doing research for the show, actually.

Okay. Yeah. So there's a South Korean rapper that did a cover of it in 2019. So that's as far as I know about it. That was as much as I could find in music though. There might be more. I couldn't find any sopranos clips this week, much to my sadness. From PRX's Radiotopia, this is the recipe with Kenji and Deb.

Where we help you discover your own perfect recipes. Kenji is the author of The Food Lab and The Walk and a columnist for The New York Times. Deb is the creator of Smitten Kitchen and the author of three best-selling cookbooks. We've both been professional recipe developers for nearly two decades, and we've got the same basic goal, to make recipes that work for you

and make you excited to get in the kitchen. But we've got very different approaches, and on this show, we'll cook and talk about each other's recipes, comparing notes to see what we can learn from each other. This week on The Recipe with Kenji and Deb, we're talking about chicken noodle soup. It fixes everything.

Chicken noodle soup has a reputation as a cure-all. It has a reputation for curing colds. And there's some amount of science behind that. But honestly, I feel like it's much more to do with the nostalgia factor. Part of it is that it's a comforting thing that whether you're making it from scratch, it fills your home with nice aromas. It makes you feel calm and comfortable. But when you're pulling out a can of like Campbell's chicken noodle soup,

there's also a nostalgia factor in that. And there's an ease to it that I think makes it something that's really good. So when my daughter's sick, for example, she loves Campbell's double noodle chicken noodle soup. And I love making it because it takes five seconds to do. Right. So there's an element of ease and comfort in it, whether you're making it from scratch or whether you're getting it out of a can. So regardless of whether it actually cures a cold or not, I think it makes everyone feel better. And in that way, I don't know, isn't your immune system stronger when you feel better?

Don't you just feel better, get physically better when you mentally feel better as well? I think so. Like it feels like comforted, like it calms your system to eat something you ate as a child. I was digging around, because the New York Times has written a couple of times

about how whether the science really adds up, because there's been like research studies on chicken noodle soup. It's a little inconclusive, but I think that there's got to be like, what's that thing where you think it's going to make you better? So it does. But I was thinking about the fact that obviously chicken soup exists everywhere. There's chickens in the world, I would say.

Like almost every culture has their own chicken soup or chicken soups. Often they do have noodles or dumplings or rice. You've got Vietnamese pho and the Italian stracciatella. That's the one with the eggs in it, right? That's the one with the scrambled eggs in it, right? Exactly. It's like egg drop soup, but Italian style.

Yes, and then so... And then I feel like almost every culture has one, but I think that when we're talking about chicken noodle soup in America, we're largely talking about like that kind of... I mean, I think of it as like an Ashkenazi Jewish thing, but that might be my own bias, but like that kind of like deli sort of... I thought of it as a Pennsylvania Dutch thing. Interesting. Delis would call it like Jewish penicillin.

Broth, herbs, parsley dill. But is that with noodles? You could also make it with matzo balls. With matzo balls, yeah. You could make it with spetzle. Matzo ball soup, I would say, is chicken noodle soup adjacent. Oh my God, we have to talk about noodle soups. We're going to get into that because does it have to fit on the spoon?

Does it not fit on the spoon? The noodles? Yeah. Or do you put the noodles in separately at the end or do you just let them sit in there and completely- We're going to get into all of that. But-

Well, before we get into that, why don't we talk about just the soup itself, the actual broth. Deb, how do you make your chicken broth? I've made it a bunch of different ways. The most bare bones one I do is I actually just take a whole chicken. This is my grandma-style chicken noodle soup. You start with bare bones. No, I don't start with bare bones.

It's a bare bones recipe. But my grandma style chicken noodle soup is in Smitten Kitchen Everyday, my second cookbook. And for that one, I wanted this to be the most intuitive one, the one you make once and then you don't need a recipe for, which is what we were talking about in the beginning, this idea that to get too wet into a recipe, I think is to make it more difficult than it needs to be. But you start by, you simmer the whole chicken until the meat is cooked,

basically. Take it out. A whole chicken, everything. Everything, like legs, breast, all on the bone. Just drop the chicken in the pot. The whole thing. Drop it in. Like how a grandma would make it. We're going to boil a bird. And you do with aromatics. You do with onion and carrot. Boil a bird. Sounds so, that sounds so good. And then you pull it out. Boiled bird sounds good, yeah. But then you pull it out once the meat's cooked. No browning, nothing.

Nothing. This is just the simplest, I call it grandma style. So you pull it out and then you pick all the meat off because it's cooked now. Set that aside, throw the carcass back in and you make the stock for the rest of that. You can simmer it for an hour, you can simmer it for three hours,

however much time you have, you can simmer it with the rest of the stuff, and that becomes your bone broth. And I love it because you're not using two or three chickens, you're not using hyper-specific parts. You're literally using one bird, the bones to make the broth, and then the meat to make the soup. And to me, very intuitive. And when you're simmering your broth, what do you stick in there?

What else do you stick in there? I think what you like to put in your broth has a lot to do with... I always talk about, like, homing devices on this show. Like, for me, I love carrot celery, like, very classic, carrot celery and onion. We didn't do a lot of garlic growing up in our chicken noodle soup. We'd put it in other things. I also really like leeks.

I wouldn't think of putting garlic in my chicken noodle soup. I like to put in some peppercorns. I like to put in a bay leaf. But I keep it pretty simple. Like, I want it to be my chicken noodle soup. I like to put in some peppercorns. I like to put in a bay leaf. But I keep it pretty simple. Like I want it to be very clean and classic. I always leave the skin on the onions. I like the way it colors the broth. How about you?

How do you make broth? Honestly, that's pretty similar to the way I do this. Okay, so if you were to look in my first book, The Food Lab, and that one, I think I talk about, I talk about the various parts of the chicken, right? So there's two elements, I think, when it comes to broth, right? The talk about the various parts of the chicken, right? So there's two elements I think when it comes to broth, right? The flavor that you get out of the chicken, then there's also the body that you get out of the chicken.

Those are two separate things, right? The flavor comes from dissolved proteins, minerals, things like that that come out of the chicken. The body of it comes from the conversion of collagen, like connective tissue that you find in muscles and ligaments and all those little bits of stuff around the bones of a chicken. That converts into gelatin over time when you simmer, right? So there's flavor and body, and those are two sort of separate elements.

Generally, if you take a whole chicken and put it in a pot of water, you're going to get both of those things at the same time. What I found interesting, though, was that flavor gets extracted pretty quickly, whereas body takes a much longer time to develop. And when you take a chicken, if you say just take a chicken carcass and you hack it up into little pieces, you'll extract flavor a lot faster out of that, but you won't actually extract body much faster.

The body will still take about just as much time to develop. And so when I was back at Cooks Illustrated, we did this recipe where the goal was to make a real quick chicken soup, which is a goal that I guess not, I don't think it's that particularly useful a goal because generally it's like when you're making chicken soup, you can just let it sit there and simmer.

You don't really have to think about it too much. But if you wanted to make chicken soup in 45 minutes, what you could do is use a bit of ground chicken because the more it's ground, the faster you're able to extract that flavor because there's just more surface area. So you take a little bit of ground chicken and you add it to some store-bought chicken stock and it like reinforces the flavor and it makes it really chickeny really quickly, but it doesn't actually add much body. So then you add a little bit of cornstarch to it

to give us like the imitation of body. I'm going off on a tangent. No, it's really interesting. In my first book, The Food Lab, what I reckon, what I said was you can take a chicken carcass, like after all the bones have been, after all the meat's been taken off. So just like the bones of the body,

those kind of softer bones, and stick them in a food processor and make a sort of chicken slurry. Like the pink slime that they supposedly make nuggets out of. You make a chicken slurry. It's not actually a really strange technique. It's what you would do if you were making a consomme where you take your vegetables and your meat and stuff

and you can really make it into a paste so that as it cooks, it extracts flavor, but then it forms like a sort of little raft that floats on top of the broth, which becomes a sort of natural filter. So you end up with a really clear broth that's really intensely flavored. So anyhow, that was the way I recommended doing it in my book. If you're going to go out and get ingredients, I think I used chicken wings and certain parts

of the legs. I can't remember exactly what I came up with, but yeah, I tested a whole bunch of them. I'm going to make stock with just legs or just wings or just thighs or whatever to see what amount of body and what amount of flavor you got out of each one of those things. And what you find is that the more scrawny and cartilaginous the bits are, so like the wings and the feet of a chicken will give you lots of body, but they also don't give you particularly good flavor.

But anyhow, so yes, there's the complicated version that I recommended in my first book, but realistically the way I make chicken soup is that I will take whatever is left over from the chicken, whether it's like a raw chicken, like a whole chicken that I cut pieces off of to cook separately, or it's like a whole roasted chicken that I now have the carcass that I've picked meat off of, and that becomes the base of my soup. I throw it in a pot, I add the scraps of whatever vegetables I have around. Typically it will be onions with the skin on, carrots that probably haven't been peeled, or maybe just the ends of the carrots because I roasted them for dinner the night before.

Whatever, like the floppy celery that I have at the bottom of the vegetable crisper because I bought a whole head of celery and I'm only realistically gonna use six sticks out of it. And the rest is gonna turn floppy. That goes into my chicken soup base. And that's it, yeah, and then I'll add typically a bay leaf or two, which does actually add flavor.

I love bay leaves, I think they get, I don't know why they're so maligned. I think they have a really nice flavor in soups and long braises. Now, if there's a ton of other things going on, you may not catch the bay leaf flavor, but on things with simpler flavor profiles, I feel like bay leaf adds something that makes my whole kitchen smell amazing.

If you're listening to a song and like, you know, one of your speakers cuts out, right? It's like, you can still recognize the song, but there's something a little bit missing, you know, or it's like you have your subwoofer goes out and you don't get that base very well anymore. So it's like you still taste everything, you still see everything, but it's like missing a little bit of an element that enhances everything else. That's the bay leaf to me. Bay leaf is the base subwoofer of your soup.

I love that. I love that. I like that. I like it. I'm going to use it. But so I want, when you were testing, because I feel like chicken feet are the unsung hero of chicken stock because there's so many bones and so much cartilage. I've always understood that they make the best tasting chicken stock, but you may not be near a butcher that's going to sell you chicken feet, or you may not want to have a pot of feet due to your own issues.

So chicken feet, at least in the taste test that I did, chicken feet do give a lot of body because they have so much connective tissue and cartilage. However, they don't taste very good. They taste like feet. They taste like chicken feet. What I found, and I think I did this at Cooks Illustrated and at Serious Eats and from the Book of Food Lab, what we found repeatedly though is that chicken breasts actually give the cleanest, most pleasing flavor, most balanced flavor. Whereas the more cartilagey and the more dark you get, going to thighs and drumsticks to feet, you get more body, but the flavor actually comes out as a little bit murkier tasting.

It's not bad. It's one of those things where if you... It's only when you taste it side by side that you're like, oh, yeah, this is different. But if someone gives you a chicken soup that's made out of chicken thighs or chicken legs, it's going to taste good. And you're not going to say, oh, jeez, I wish you had made this out of breasts. I love using just the breastfeed for soup if I have enough that I don't need to use

the whole chicken, but again, the grandma style is you're just going to use it all. I'm talking about for the final soup, not just the stock. So you found that the chicken breast bones actually imparted nice flavor in the stock, a very clean one, or was it just the chicken breast meat? Yeah, it's the chicken carcass with the breast bits attached to it. Well, and the meat in there as well. If you're going to be cooking like you did, if you're gonna be cooking the meat in the broth at the beginning, taking it out and then finishing the broth,

doing it with the breast on the bone, it gives you a sort of cleaner, nicer flavor than doing it with a thigh or a leg on the bone does. You also see it in the soup when you're skimming your soup at the beginning. When you make it with the dark meat and those bones that have a lot of those joints that have more blood in them,

you'll see like the scum floating on the top. You get that kind of brown gray scum, those bubbles that float on the top, that give it a kind of weird off flavor, like a kind of metallic flavor. You get a lot more of that from the leg meat than you do from the breast meat. But all that said, I think a real grandma style is just like not waste anything, right? Exactly. That's boil the chicken, pick the chicken. You use the chicken for whatever you're going to use and then whatever's left over becomes your soup.

Yeah, obviously you want to make sure you've taken out like the organs and the stuff that will make it taste up. But can we talk about carcasses for a minute? Let's talk about carcasses. Because people always say, say like, let's say you've roasted a chicken, or you've roasted a chicken. People always say that you should save the carcass for soup. But should that carcass be fully picked of meat or not?

Because I'm of the, it should be fully picked of meat or not. Because I'm of the, it should be fully picked camp, because I think kind of cooking chicken past its done point leads to that unpleasant overcooked chicken taste. I'm very sensitive to it. So I needed to be like just... That's why I just cook my, in my grandma's time, I cook it till the chicken's done. I take that chicken off the bone

and then I'm just simmering the bones. I don't like that boil to death chicken flavor. I think people call that warmed over. Like when you roast a chicken, then you let it cool, and then you heat it up again, it gets like what people call a warmed over flavor. I'm not sure exactly what that flavor is, but I know specifically the flavor you're talking about.

And I suppose, yeah, you can get some of that in the broth in the end. So sure, I would pick the meat anyway, just because you don't want to waste it. Like you'd pick the meat all, you'd pick all the meat off and then add it back to the soup at the very end. But I'm like a nut about getting it all off. You do you.

Listen, I have issues, okay? I think it's been established. So how long do you cook a broth for? You've got your bones, you've got your aromatics, you've got your bay leaf. So one test that I've done pretty extensively is testing chicken cooked in a slow cooker versus a pot on the stove versus in a pressure cooker. And slow cookers, like generally the slowest setting on them is going to be like a six hour thing. You put it in, you leave for work, you come back at the end of the day. I found pretty universally that slow

cookers produce the worst broth. Kenji does not like slow cookers, everybody at home. He's not a fan. It's not that I'm not a fan. It's that I've done the blind taste test. We did blind taste tests and almost everything made in a slow cooker. Universally, if you make something in a slow cooker, it comes out with less flavor, less body.

It's just worse than if you do it on the stove top or if you do it in a pressure cooker. I understand the convenience of a slow cooker and that's a different thing. That's the thing you have to factor in for yourself. But if you're talking just on pure flavor, a slow cooker is gonna produce an inferior tasting broth. It's gonna taste thinner and it also gets some of those

kind of metallic, sour, strange flavors. And again, this is one of those things where if you're not tasting it side by side, you're probably gonna be totally happy with it. I'm not telling you to throw away your slow cooker. I. I'm not telling you to throw away your slow cooker. I mean, I am telling you to throw away your slow cooker. No, I'm not throwing away my slow cooker. Not really telling you to throw away your slow cooker.

But you like the pressure cooker. The pressure cooker is great for extracting gelatin and making... You can make a chicken stock in under an hour, a very good one in a pressure cooker. Oh yeah, like 45 minutes. Yeah. And what a pressure cooker is really great at is that there's minimal boiling in a pressure cooker. Oh yeah, like 45 minutes. Yeah. And what a pressure cooker is really great at is that there's minimal boiling inside a pressure cooker. There's a little bit of boiling that goes on at the beginning as you're building the

pressure. But once you're at pressure, there's virtually no boiling going on inside. So that means there's not very much agitation. And when you're cooking chicken soup or any kind of stock, the more you agitate things, the murkier and cloudier your broth is going to get and the more of those sort of off flavors you're going to extract. It's not a big issue. If you don't care that your broth is cloudy looking or a little bit murky, it's fine, right? But a pressure cooker, what it does is it'll produce a really clear broth

that's really intensely flavored because the pressure prevents things inside from boiling. So there's no agitation going on, but you're getting really good extraction because of the higher temperature. So yeah, pressure cooker, in side-by-side tests I've done, like blind tests where people just taste a broth made in a pressure cooker versus a slow cooker versus on the stovetop. Pressure cooker wins almost every time.

Have you ever heard about putting vinegar in the stock to help extract the goodness in the bones? I have heard of that. Never tested it? I've never tried it. Have you? I feel like I've read about it, but I would probably just text you and ask you what you thought of it before I actually put vinegar in my stock because why should I have authority

on this? That's a good question. I'm curious though. Okay. So when we come back from our break, we are going to keep talking about chicken noodle soup and we're going to talk about all the fun stuff we put in it and like the best kind of noodles, when to add noodles, how much noodles, toppings. Why you should never sweat your vegetables.

I am pro sweating vegetables, so we're going to fight a little bit. Coming up next on the recipe. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.

We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back.

We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Welcome back to the recipe with Kenji and Deb. Today we're talking about chicken noodle soup. We've talked about the broth and now we're going to talk about everything that you stick into that broth. The vegetables, the chicken and most controversially, most importantly, most tangent prone noodles. The nudes. Nudes.

Let's start with the vegetables. Kenji, when you're making a soup stock, we talked about how it sounds like ours are very similar. We like to use some sort of bones or carcass, carrots, celery, onion, skin on for color. I like bay leaves. I like a little peppercorn in there. I feel like it just gives it a little flavor at season. Are the vegetables that you boil for your stock the one you put in

your final soup? Because I am of the belief that they have given what they needed to give and we've thanked them for their service and I toss them and then I put in new vegetables. And this is a very contentious thing. Like people in my comments, people in my emails, they don't like the idea of throwing out the stock vegetables, but I feel like they're collapsed. They're mush. They have nothing left to add.

We got what we needed from them. They're the fallen soldiers that you're just going to discard, right? Yeah, we're not saving the bones either. When I strain the broth, the stock, I strain the stock. Everything. So I don't think it's true that they've given everything they can. If you take a carrot out of a broth that's been simmering and you eat it, it still tastes, it's still got flavor.

It's not like you're eating just like a pile of mushy cardboard. It tastes like carrot, it tastes like the broth. So the idea that you're like just throwing out, like it's given all the flavor it can give is I think a little bit incorrect. There's ways you can deal with this, right? If you don't want to deal with the waste. The way I typically deal with it is that I just won't use the good part of the carrot in the broth.

So if I'm making broth, what I'll do is I'll have my carrot, I'll scrub it, I will peel it, maybe I'll chop off the end of it, being a little bit generous with how much I chop off of both ends and I'll throw all that into the stock pot. And then the part of the carrot that's gonna go into the soup, I'll save. Um, and same thing with the celery, you know, like I'm, I'll cut off like the

leaves and the kind of floppier end bits, the parts that are starting to get a little bit dry or floppy, I might cut off the root and that goes into my stock. And then like the crispier core bits that it'll cut into nicer pieces. I'll save those. And then with the onions, I'll cut off the ends. I'll stem it. Maybe I'll pull off like a few extra layers that I normally would before slicing it and put all those layers into the stock.

I would rarely, unless I'm making like a giant batch of something or I'm working at a restaurant, would I take fresh, like a whole fresh carrot, chop it up and throw it into my stock? I would stick to using just the scraps. But I don't know, I don't know if that's just me. Do you use a separate onion when you're making your stock and then throw in a whole second onion? I don't put onion in my final soup.

I use it for the stock. In the final soup, I really like to use a fresh diced carrot. For years I added fresh celery too to the end, like adding a fresh mirepoix. It's not mirepoix because it doesn't have the onion in it. But I have over the last several years, this is a little bit from like feedback from my children who are very opinionated at the dinner table, but they don't really love celery in the final soup. They should be. And so they, I call them like the Statler and Waldorf, like mouthing off from the balcony

with their cantankerous opinions on everything I do. But I'm with them. I would say that the final soup celery isn't the best celery. Like celery is so essential for stock, but I don't know that it's as important for the final soup. What I love having in the final soup, and celery is so essential for stock, but I don't know that it's as important for the final soup. What I love having in the final soup, and this is just my own personal preference, I like leek.

You like leeks, yeah, leeks are good. Leeks are great soup vegetable. Yes. I love a good leek too. And they're great soup vegetable because they come with a built-in stock section. So I've put them in stock, but what I really like is at the end,

when for the final, I love seeing like little rings of leeks in my, I love the green. I love leeks because I always, and I don't think anyone else really agrees with me on this, but I feel like they taste like a cross between an onion and a potato and a green. They have this mellow sweetness that I love and see.

Sure, I can see that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You see the potato thing? I can sort of see that. It's like a potato onion. Yeah, I can mildly see it. Yeah, sure. Maybe it's just because I have a potato and leek association

because they go well together. Maybe that's it. Wait, but Deb, are you saying you don't, when you buy a leek and you cut off like half of it because the greens are too fibrous to eat and you don't put that in your stock then? So I've done it before, but I felt like it made my stock bitter,

but maybe I did it wrong because I know there's a lot of Asian soups that might use the darker green because I would love to use it. I hate wasting it, but I didn't like the way it came out. Yeah. Even in a French restaurant, you're going to take the tully greens and put it in a stock. I need to try it again. Maybe it was something else that made it bitter and maybe I just made it wrong because I hate

throwing it away. Maybe I have a lousy attitude, which I haven't established, but I love seeing like the yellow, green, white leaks and diced carrots in my final soup. So that's my end vegetables. And I don't like to just put them into the broth. I like to sweat them for a minute first, ideally in some of the chicken fat I've skimmed from the stock. And I know you're anti-sweating.

I've tried it both ways. And for me, when I just add, and I do have recipes where I tell you to just toss the vegetables back in. I will say that my current favorite way is just, and I don't mean sweating them until they're really mushy and cooked, just getting them started so they're like a little translucent. I feel that when I cook them a bit in the fat, they have a sweeter, more interesting flavor. And when I just throw them directly in the soup,

I get a little bit of that boiled vegetable vibe, that like boiled vegetable smell that I don't like. But I'm picky. So to me, it's, you end up with two different soups. I'm not saying like that one is, I think it's a choice you have to make. And I agree, yes. So when you sweat your vegetables, they get a sweeter taste to them. And that's the thing that I feel when I eat a soup where the vegetables have been lightly sweated,

you can taste that sweetness and you can taste that it doesn't quite taste like the fresh vegetables. And to me, like that just tastes a little off. It's if I ate, if I got a bottle of Heinz ketchup and someone had swapped it out for Hunts, maybe that's a bad example because Heinz is obviously the right choice, unless Hunts is advertising with us, I don't know. But it tastes like someone just switched your brand around and you're like, wait a minute, something's a little off here. And it's not that it's wrong or that it's bad.

It's just, it doesn't taste quite taste right to me. To me, the flavor of the raw vegetables that have just been simmered without any amount of sweating, without any of that sort of sweetening that you get when you sweat them, to me, that's the flavor that I associate with chicken soup. In the same way that like, when you make chicken soup out of a roasted carcass versus out of raw chicken,

it tastes different, right? If you get those roasty flavors, and that's not, it's not a bad thing, but then it becomes roasted chicken soup and not just plain chicken soup. I don't know why it is, but for me, it's also that chicken soup is such a simple, simple thing that the whole step of adding extra fat to it or skimming off the fat, sweating the vegetables and that, it's just a step that I don't want to bother taking.

I want to boil my broth. I want to skim it onto a new pot, dump my vegetables in, let it boil and that's it. But wait, that's exactly when you do it because I'm going to dump the stock and the bones, so I'm going to strain it. So now it's elsewhere. Now the pot's empty, so I just sweat the vegetables in the bottom for a moment. Oh, I just strain it straight into a second pot. Look at your big kitchen and multiple pots. What I usually do actually is I'll make my stock into a wok. I make my wok, I make it in my wok these days and then I skim it into a soup pot.

You do? How many quarts does your wok hold? It holds one chicken's worth of stock. I don't know, probably three quarts maybe? Oh, okay. That's impressive. It's a 14-inch wok. You can take a chicken carcass, hack it up in the sink, and then just enough water to cover it. But I also think this is true of everything, because we talk about a lot of comfort food on the show.

We talk about mac and cheese and grilled cheese and ziti. So much when you talk about how the sweat. All the cheese things, yeah. Yeah, we're in anything with orange cheese or popcorn, like we're going to cover it with a level of detail you didn't ask for on the show. But when you talk about what tastes different to you and it tastes off, because that's because it's probably chicken noodle soup more than any other thing we've talked about on the show. You want it to taste like home. You want it to taste like the way you had it growing up. Like you want it to have it's got a nostalgia point. You don't.

I would say for you as a New York Jew, that's probably more true than for me as someone who grew up in a Japanese household. But yes, for me, chicken soup was more, was Campbell's. Wow. Like my mom sometimes made chicken soup growing up, but it wasn't like, it was more often than not, it would be from a can, condensed chicken noodle soup, which I love. I do still love Campbell's condensed chicken noodle soup. They got that recipe right.

They certainly did get the recipe right. And they got the marketing right, and they got the nostalgia factor right. You get kids when they're, my daughter forever is going to be a Campbell's fan because she eats Campbell's soup when she's sick now. You build those things, you convince parents to give it to kids and then those kids are fans for life.

That's how McDonald's does it, that's how Campbell's does it, that's how they all do it, that's how the cigarette companies do it. So now I'm regretting making my life so difficult that my kids are only going to think that homemade chicken noodle soup is the right one because now... I could have been opening a can, Kenji. Like, why am I making things so hard? Speaking of homemade homemade stuff though, do you make your own noodles?

I have made my own noodles before. I don't always love them more. I really like a bagged egg noodle. My husband, I disagree on it. He likes the twisty ones like he likes the bigger soup noodle, but I find it clumsy to get it on the spoon. I like the ones that are like short pieces of spaghetti or firmicelli. I like to see a lot of it.

Oh, wow. So you don't like the wide flat egg noodles. I like them for other things, like in a bowl with butter and salt. For me, it's like the wide, if I'm making chicken noodle soup, the wider the better. He thinks the little ones are harder to get on the spoon, but I think the bigger ones are. But anyway, since I'm usually cooking, I win. I certainly think like little pieces of broken up spaghetti are the hardest to get on the spoon, but I think the bigger ones are. But anyway, since I'm usually cooking, I win. I certainly think like little pieces of broken up spaghetti

are the hardest to get on the spoon. Like I would do either real tiny things, like sometimes I'll buy alphabet pasta, or I'll buy stars. Oh, I love doing that for the kids. They're not into it. I thought alphabet soup is the coolest thing growing up. I thought it was so cool.

Have you tried telling them that there's a bee in their soup? No, but I should. I also love stars. Have you done chicken soup with, but I should. I also love stars. Have you done chicken soup with stars? I do like chicken soup with stars. When I do that, sometimes what I'll do is I'll also make the little chicken meatballs, where you take like chicken breast

and you grind it up in a food processor with some Parmesan, maybe an egg in there, and then you pipe it into the soup. You put it into a pastry bag or into a Ziploc bag. You cut off the end and you pipe it in and cut the little balls of chicken and Parmesan off as they drop into the soup. I don't know what you call it into a pastry bag or into a Ziploc bag, you cut off the end and you pipe it in and cut the little balls of chicken and Parmesan off as they drop into the soup. I don't know what you call it. It's like a-

It's like an Italian wedding soup, right? I guess it's similar to that. Yeah, yeah, I guess it's similar to that. Where you have tiny bits of pasta and you have little meatballs, yeah. That's fine. I've been working on a soup. I've been making it a bunch this fall.

Maybe I'll have it done by the time this episode's out, but probably not. But I've been working on it. I call it like a, I've been calling it a Jewish wedding soup because it's like Italian wedding soup which has the meatballs in it. But I'm using ground chicken meat, like I'm making little meatballs with an egg and some herbs in it. And then sometimes I use matzo meal instead of breadcrumbs because that's like the nostalgia

factor plus it's very, so it's a very lightweight meatball and I use that instead of the chicken. And one thing I like about that is that I feel like it dries out a lot less. The pieces of chicken in a chicken noodle soup can very easily, if you're heating it too long or if you're re-heating it over a few days, it can get dried out and then I don't like it anymore. But the meatballs I feel are more forgiving. But that's a separate recipe. There's this really good soup that I had from Balabusa, Ainaar Admoni, you know her?

Yeah. She had a recipe for this. It was like a matzo ball soup, but instead of matzo balls, you make these dumplings out of chicken, ground chicken and chickpeas. Ooh. It's like half chicken and half chickpeas. And it's really delicious and you poach them in the soup in the same way. Wait, but let's jump back, because I want to ask you something important about the noodles, right?

Okay. So, when you're making chicken noodle soup, you take your noodles, you have your noodles, you have your pot of broth boiling, you put your vegetables in there, your vegetables are starting to get soft, you maybe add your noodles in, they take about what, 10 minutes to cook, seven minutes to cook,

so you add them when your vegetables are halfway soft so that by the time the noodles are cooked, the vegetables are fully cooked. So you got your soup there, you add your shredded chicken in, or your diced chicken, whatever it is. Do you shred by hand or do you dice, by the way? I do a mix.

Sometimes I just get in there and rip it apart with my hands, usually with gloves on, because I don't want to get my hands too dirty. Oh, I like to get my hands dirty. Going back to the Caesar salad episode, Deb doesn't like to get food under her fingernails. But that is probably the most effective way, because you can really get the pieces just right. Otherwise, I might use two forks or just cut it into chunks with a knife. Basically, I do anything about it. Yeah. I cut it into chunks with a knife when I want to make it seem more like the canned

soup, like it's because canned soup always has little chunks of chicken. But anyway, we're on another tangent. So you drop your chicken there in the last moment. And so now you have perfectly cooked vegetables, perfectly cooked noodles, perfectly cooked chicken, hot broth. You're eating it. Now you got leftovers, you put them in the fridge, the next day you come out and you just got this congealed blob of like solid noodles that have absorbed all the broth. The noodles drink the soup and you've got nothing left. I have to talk about this because I literally looked it up recently. So there is this, let me see if I can find my notes on it, because there is this, Jamie

Attenberg, she's a novelist, she's written a whole bunch of wonderful books. And do you know when you read like an essay or article and it just stays with you forever? In 2013, she wrote this essay in the New York Times called The Unlikely Chef. And she talked about her mother who like does not cook and has never made chicken noodle soup, decided to make her chicken noodle soup when she was sick one day. And it was, they were like maybe texting with her dad and he was joking that you guys have no business cooking. Like you really shouldn't be like, why don't you just order this in?

And they were very insistent upon making it. And they followed the recipe and they made this beautiful broth and they were all ready to go. And then they dumped the noodles in and it drank the entire soup. They watch in horror as their hard work. You spend hours maybe making your stock just perfect

and then the noodles just drink it all. So I am, when I write recipes for chicken noodle soup or where you add noodles, I'm almost excessively because of Jamie Attenberg's essay, I am almost excessively attuned to is there enough liquid in here to add the noodles without it drinking up all of your hard work? And honestly, quite often, I will just cook like...

There's never enough liquid. Yeah, I think that's, I really think that's the only way to do it. I think the most reliable way, especially if you want to have it for a bunch of days, is to just go cook those noodles separately in a pot. You could use salted water, you could use a bouillon water. Like you could use chicken bouillon there to get the flavor right. So it doesn't just taste nothing like soup. And then you just add it in.

And also for like my family who wants their soup to be three quarters noodles, it's perfect, but it doesn't ruin. But you've just you spent all that time making this beautiful bone broth. I would hate to see it go to waste as like pasta cooking water. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. That's what I do also. I cook the, unless I know we're going to finish the whole pot at once, which you never know because yeah, I got two kids and I never know how much they're going to actually eat. I cook the noodles separately and then I add them in. And even when I pack the leftovers for my daughter the next day, I put the soup and the vegetables and chicken

and stuff into a thermos and then in a little separate snack container, I put the cooked noodles so that she can add them to the broth at lunchtime herself. That's a thing I think it's good to do with kids. That's like very high standards you're setting for her. That's not even high standards. I think that's a good thing to do with kids is like if you, the more interactive you make their lunch, the more likely they are to eat it. If they can assemble their own sandwiches or dress their own salad, like I think they're

more likely to eat it then because it adds a little fun factor to it. Maybe that's what I'm doing wrong. I don't know. But I really personally, I prefer to keep those noodles separate because for that exact reason, I don't want it. Especially when you've gone through the effort of having a carcass and using bones

and like trying to make this beautiful stock. It shouldn't be wasted. Share the soup with your friends and family. Don't share it with your noodles. Exactly, I get very stingy with it. All right. So we've got our wrap up questions. Okay.

Can you waffle chickens? I don't think you should. Can you waffle leftover chicken soup? I think the only way you could potentially do that is if you let the noodles drink up all the soup and it really turns into just a block of soup soaked noodles. Even then, I'm not sure you could do it. I think it might just turn to mush. But I think the answer is probably no. You can't waffle chicken soup. No. Can you taco chicken soup?

Oh, geez. Certainly you could taco the fillings. Again, I'm not sure that you'd want to. I think what you could potentially do is maybe you could thicken it up the way you were going to make like a chicken pot pie filling. Like if you add a little bit of like a flour and butter to it and get like a really nice and stewy consistency And then maybe you can make a little like the inside of a in the same way that you get like spaghetti tacos You take chicken noodle soup tacos that have been like thickened up and so it's like a little bit creamy and thick Then maybe you could taco it that might be it tastes good. I don't know why it wouldn't taste good I would not eat it, but I probably, I would rather probably just eat it as soup.

Okay, can you fry chicken noodle soup in butter in a pan? So this one, I think actually, if you do get that stage where your noodles have absorbed the broth and you have a really thick one, you could do it the same way like you could do rivolita, like Italian bean and vegetable soup that you that ends up being like a stew that you can fry in a pan. If you reduce chicken soup down enough, I think you could definitely turn it into like a chicken soup pancake that's fried in butter

just on its own and get like little bits of crispy stuff. And it ends up with the texture of, I think we've talked about paps on this show before, right? What is it? A pap is like a thing that's, so the classic one would be like a Tuscan bread and tomato soup where it's like, it's sort of like a porridge-y texture. So it's not quite a soup.

It's like a soup that's been turned into a real thick stew. It's like ribollita would be one. Yeah, that's a delicious one. I don't know that I want my chicken noodle soup as mush. Next time I accidentally let my noodles drink the soup, I'm going to try sticking the whole thing in a non-stick pan and just frying it in butter and see what happens. I bet it'll taste good. I feel like it's a core childhood memory to have that leftover chicken noodle soup in the square Tupperware container

and like dumping it in and it comes out as a like a cube. Like a little chlup. With the gelatinous stock and also the like overcooked noodles that have absorbed everything. Have you seen the video of the guy, I think he's trying to eat five whole canned chickens, but there's the video is just this guy opening up a can, whole chickens in a can. Have you seen these whole chickens in a can? No, I think we're on- They're a large can that has a whole chicken and gelatinous stock and then you open it up

and it just has this, there's a whole chicken just like plops out of it. My son asked me if I've seen a baseball video. I just think we're on different algorithms and that's okay. Like we're just on different TikToks. Okay, Kenji, does chicken noodle soup leftover well? Yeah, as long as you keep the noodles separate for sure. It's like one of the ultimate leftovers I feel like. It's just walking into like the deli, you pick up,

I don't know if you buy chicken noodle soup from the deli ever. I've done it, yeah. I do, but yeah, you buy those quart containers of chicken noodle soup or chicken matzo ball soup and they're wonderful, yeah. You just have to keep the noodles separate and add them at the end. Ideally, exactly. And does it come out of kids clothes easily?

I feel like it's a, I feel like you can get chicken noodle soup out of clothes. It depends how fatty it is. Yeah. You can, yeah. Sometimes those little fat, little blobs of chicken fat get into your apron or your clothes and then you have a permanent little blob of chicken fat on your apron or clothes no matter how much you wash it. Deb, we talked about chicken noodle soup but we really strictly talked about it in the

American sense when in reality there are chicken noodle soups and chicken soups from all over the world. I didn't get to show off my favorite German egg noodles, but that's okay. In Asia alone, like every country has its own version of chicken noodle soup. There's a lot, we're really only scratching the surface of chicken noodle soup here, so I'm sure we will revisit the subject once again

in the future. I love it. That's it for today's episode. Is there another recipe or food you want us to chat about? Tell us at TheRecipePodcast.com or on socials at Kenji and Deb. Or you can call us and leave us a message at 202-709-7607. The recipe is created and co-hosted by Deb Perlman and Jay Kenji Lopez-Alt. Our producers are Jocelyn Gonzalez, Perry Gregory, and Pedro Rafael Rosado of PRX Productions.

Edwin Ochoa is the project manager. The executive producer for Radiotopia is Audrey Mardovich, and Yori Losardo is the director of network operations. Apu Gotay, Emmanuel Johnson, and Mike Russo handle our social media. We'll see you next time on The Recipe with Deb and Kenji.