Seeking the elixir of eternal life or just a good soup for the weekend? This chicken soup recipe has the answer for both!

Nothing can heal better than a nice big bowl of chicken soup. At least this is the old saying that plenty of grandmothers were touting to their daughters and their grandchildren thorugh the centuries. Generations grew up with the blind belief that chicken soup can cure cold, hangover or in fact almost anything until the internet came to existence.

With the “knowledge of humanity at our fingertip” at all the time, we don’t need our ancestors to tell us about old tales, half cooked prejudices or any other essence of decades of peaceful existence during the five o’clock tea. We can get them on our own on social media in a flash.

Social media is like the ocean. It absorbs all the trash of modern civilization and after a storm some of those pieces float back reminding us about our past and heritage.

Not as our ancestors deep rooted beliefs in observatory science were wrong or at least not more than our present knowledge about the world is wrong in the mirror of future discoveries.

There were times when most of the world thought the Earth is flat, common cold is caught because of cold weather or there is life on Mars. Most of those things proved to be different during the centuries and soon we will see if there is life on our planetary neighbor or not. If there is, they don’t seem to be too social though…

Ages went by without disturbing the chicken soup’s hegemony in the realm of gastronomy as the ultimate medicine that cures all sort of illnesses. It earned the name Jewish penicillin after serving as an ersatz penicillin in two world wars.

As chicken soup can be made at home by anyone who has a chicken and a bunch of vegetables, no pharmaceutical company was interested in researching the health benefits of such cheap elixirs, let alone promoting it to the greater public.

However, in the year of 2000 a handful of brave scientists at the university of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha bravely picked up the gloves and conducted searches in the service of humanity.

Laboratory experiment found that chicken soup may have anti-inflammatory effects that could hypothetically lead to temporary ease from symptoms of illness.

Unfortunately, as this experiment was conducted in a laboratory with purified cells, the real-life effectiveness could not be proved until someone had the passion or more importantly resources to organize some trials outside of the lab’s walls.

Probably such times will not arrive until someone sees great business opportunity in selling cold treatment chicken soup cubes that can be made ready under 5 minutes and eliminates all symptoms of flue while being tasty and healthy too.

Until that time though, we have to make our own chicken soup in the old way with the same naturally occurring ingredients. The bad news is that while vegetables aren’t too picky to be cooked into soups, chickens are.

Our factory-made chickens are pretty bad for old style chicken soups. It’s not only because how those poor things were bred, fed, raised and slaughtered but because of their diet factory chickens taste bad in soups.

Chicken in soup will not be flavored with all sort of spices and herbs to give it a pleasant or at least bearable flavor but its meat itself will flavor the soup so we have to have good tasting meat to start with.

It goes without saying that free range chickens that are left to roam all their life, feed on a variety of insects, seeds and grow naturally, are the best for this sort of soup. The older the chicken is, longer we need to cook it to be tender, thus the best tasting our soup will be.

Most of us have no access to that sort of meat though. We have to be contented with chickens labelled as vegetarian fed with the yellow skin that is generally due to their diet of corn.

To give a favor for our taste buds just stay away from the pale chickens if planning to have tasty soups.

The yellow skin and yellowish meat are important part of the cooking process as the fat under the skin contains the necessary flavors for the soup so even if someone doesn’t like skins, don’t discard them until the soup is cooked with them.

Making chicken soup is not an exact science, though. The more vegetables we use, the better tasting it will be. Generally the soup is made with root vegetables like onion, carrot, variety of white carrots, potato for starch and black pepper with salt to taste. Above of these basics pepper, paprika, tomato, cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbages or whatever else that tastes good in soups can be used as additional ingredient for flavoring or to simply enjoy.

Ingredients

Broth

1 Chicken (yellow skinned vegetarian fed)
2 teaspoons Salt
3 Carrots
2 Parsley root, parsnip or white carrot
3 cloves Garlic
1 bunch Parsley
1 Onion
1 Italian green pepper
1 Tomato
½ teaspoon Black pepper (whole)
½ teaspoon Paprika (optional)
8 cup / 1.8L Water

Vegetables

3½ oz / 100g Brussels sprouts
7 oz / 200g Broccoli
3½ oz Cauliflower
14 oz / 400g Carrot (sliced)

How to make Chicken soup

Get a yellow skinned vegetarian fed chicken then take it apart. Take the skin of if desired but cook it with the meat as fat under the skin is essential for the flavor of the soup.
Prepare the vegetables by peeling the carrot and parsley root and garlic. It’s advisable to bind together the parsley leaves so we don’t have to hunt for them later one by one. Only remove the onion outmost layer. Halve or quarter the pepper and tomato.
Place the chicken into a large pot.
Add all the broth ingredients.
Fill the pot up with water. The more water we use, the more ingredients we have to add for a flavorful soup. Never add water at the end of the cooking process!
Place the lid on and bring the water to boil then cook the meat ready on low heat. Young chickens generally don’t need more than one hour of cooking. Older birds though, could require hours of simmering.
Add the rest of the vegetables to the soup then bring it to boil on high heat. When the soup starts to boil lower the heat and simmer it until the vegetables have the desired texture. The cooking time for vegetables varies but 10 minutes simmering should be plenty to cook them tender and still preserve some of their nutritientes.
Take it off heat and let it sit for at least 10 – 30 more minutes with the lid still on. It could be served immediately but it’s scorching hot so not really recommended. When the dish is served as an only meal thin noodle like pasta is served in it to provide more energy on one go.