John Myers
For a chicken soup, you need a ready-to-cook soup chicken without offal, soup vegetables, and spices. Classic soup vegetables are carrots, celeriac, leeks, onions, parsley root, turnips, and herbs such as parsley, celery, or thyme. Typical spices for chicken soup are salt and pepper, as well as juniper berries, bay leaves, and cloves.
Halve the onions and sauté them in a pan without fat until light brown. Then put the soup chicken in a large saucepan with the spices and the onion halves and fill up with cold water. Bring everything together to a simmer and then reduce the heat. The chicken will simmer like this for an hour and a half to two hours. This creates foam again and again, which you have to skim off with a ladle.
Clean the soup vegetables and cut them into small pieces. When the chicken is done, remove it from the pot and set it aside. Put the vegetables in the pot and cook for 20 minutes. Then remove the onion halves.
Remove the skin and bones from the chicken and cut them into bite-sized pieces. These go back to the vegetables in the soup pot. You now have to bring the chicken soup to the boil again, after which it is ready to be served. Sprinkle them with fresh herbs.
Chicken soup and chicken stew have a beneficial effect on colds: When the soup chicken is cooked, the protein cysteine is transferred to the soup. Cysteine acts as a decongestant and anti-inflammatory, so the chicken soup can actually aid in the recovery process. In addition, the warmth of the soup has a decongestant effect on the mucous membranes and makes the phlegm more fluid. If you cook chili, ginger, and black beans in the chicken soup, you can boost the anti-inflammatory effects even more.
You can vary the chicken soup even further by cooking it with egg custard or herb pancakes. Soy sauce, sugar snap peas, soup noodles, rice, semolina dumplings, or ravioli also taste great.
