Ginger Garlic Chicken Noodle Soup by Deb Perelman

A deeply flavored chicken noodle soup you can make in 45 minutes is one we’re going to want to make as often as possible.

This is a featured recipe from Smitten Kitchen Keepers: New Classics for Your Forever Files by this week’s guest, Deb Perelman. You can also hear our conversation with Deb here:

Deb Perelman on building Smitten Kitchen and what makes a "keeper" recipe

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Ginger Garlic Chicken Noodle Soup by Deb Perelman

Excerpted with permission from Smitten Kitchen Keepers: New Classics for Your Forever Files by Deb Perelman:

On a cold winter weekend day when nobody wants to go outside, there are few better things than a pot of chicken noodle soup, quietly simmering on the stove while my family, in all likelihood, is glued to another Star Wars marathon. But on a cold winter weekend day when nobody wants to go outside but we also don’t want to spend the afternoon long-cooking a pot of bone broth? This, this is the soup we make.

One of my favorite discoveries of the last few years was that I didn’t actually need to make, to buy, or even to build-from-bouillon chicken stock to make chicken noodle soup. It turns out that just simmering boneless, skinless chicken thighs with aromatics in salted water creates a gentle but delicious soup-building base. With ginger, garlic, scallions, and a punchy seasoning added at the end, all efforts to explain calmly how much I love this soup fall short. This is the first recipe I worked on for this book, and, for us, the very definition of a keeper. A deeply flavored chicken noodle soup you can make in 45 minutes is one we’re going to want to make as often as possible.

A few things here are key: Chicken thigh cutlets have more fat than breast cutlets, and the richness helps build a more flavorful soup here. Adding the soy sauce, vinegar, and sesame oil at the end as a salty, robust finish, versus cooking them into the broth, keeps them from getting lost in the soup. This gives it a bit of a hot-and-sour-soup note, too, which is also finished with vinegar.