Chicken Noodle Soup

Chicken noodle soup may cure the common cold, but that doesn’t mean it always tastes particularly good. The broth can be thin, the chicken bland, and the noodles mushy. How do you make perfect chicken noodle soup? Here’s what we discovered:

Test Kitchen Discoveries

• Because the broth is so important to the success of the soup, canned broth won’t do. Make a simple, but very full-flavored, broth from chicken thighs. Browning the chicken thighs adds valuable flavor and takes just minutes.
• Keep the flavors of the broth simple for the purest-flavored soup. Along with the chicken, add just onion and bay leaves.
• While the meat from the thighs can be used in the soup, we prefer reserving the dark meat for another use and using boneless, skinless chicken breasts in the soup. The tender meat can be cooked in the simmering broth, thereby improving the flavor of each.
• Make sure to remove the fat from the broth before serving; otherwise the soup will be greasy. To easily remove the grease, simply drop a single sheet of paper towel on top of the cooling broth, gather the corners of the towel, and lift up, allowing excess broth to drip back into the broth. Repeat as necessary with fresh paper towels until all the grease is gone.
• Sauté the vegetables (just onion, carrot, and celery) to concentrate their flavors and cook the noodles in the broth.