chicken soup

1.2.1. Meat Soups – Introduction

I rarely make pure meat stock/broth. I almost always add vegetables and eat it all together.

Blood Soup

Blood is rarely available as a food product because it spoils very quickly. Nutritionally, it is a most complete food. It makes a wonderfully full-flavored soup even without any added ingredients. The Maasai people used to thrive on a blood and milk diet.

Beef Soup

I don't use 'good' beef cuts for soup meat very often, the exception being the Mexican steak soups. The tougher cuts that required prolonged moist cooking to become sufficiently tender are the more common choice, like oxtail, shank and to a lesser extent chuck meat. Brisket could also be a good choice if it hasn't been too aggressively trimmed, but I’d rather prepare that in the oven or in a pot roast.

Using meat with bones gives the soup a richer flavor.  Ox tail, shank and bone-in chuck all make delicious soups, especially when vegetables are added. You may notice that the recipes in this group are all pretty much the same preparation method, only with different vegetables. I like the soups, but I don’t care too much for the meat when it has been simmering for a long time. I’ll eat some of it but soup meat certainly is not my favorite meat.

Organ meat aka offal also makes very good soup.

 

Pork Soup

I don't make pork soup very often, because I don't buy many pork cuts that require boiling.

Pig’s feet, and ground meat (meatballs) can be cooked into wonderful soups. I usually braise pork ribs, but the bones and drippings may get recycled to make soup.

Poultry Soup

Birds that are more than 6 months old aren’t much good for anything other than soup.
Birds also have the advantage that they have a lot of easy-to-handle bones, which produce a richer flavor. After that delicious fryer has been eaten, the leftovers and the bones can be used to cook soup with.
Canned bird meat also makes a very good soup.

Chicken:
If you have not seen it for yourself, you may have a hard time believing the differences between free-range backyard chickens and factory-farmed chickens. Sadly enough, the latter is all I have access to since a tornado wiped out my chicken coop in 2015.

Even though I don’t care much to eat soup chicken meat, chicken soup itself is always wonderful. Instead of boiling fryer chickens to death, I only simmer them for 15-20 minutes—not enough to cook them fully through—and finish them off by pan-frying or roasting. That way I can flavor the soup without boiling all the flavor out of the chicken.

Duck:
Only available in one local store around the holly days. I started raising them in my backyard to get a more reasonable cost. Even when I raised and harvested young ducks, I would almost always part the duck. Seared duck breast fillet is a delicacy, imo much superior to roast duck or even the best quality beef steak. I would cut the breast fillet away before cooking the duck, and since as I was cutting anyway, I went on and parted the entire bird. That means I always had a duck carcass for soup. :-)

Goose:
Geese are considerably bigger than chickens or ducks, yet they have surprisingly little meat on that large body. This year (2019) is the first time I've seen goose in a local store, but  no one is buying them at more than $60.

Turkey:
Unless you are into ostriches, turkey is probably the biggest bird you'll ever get on your kitchen table. Even the smallest ones are way too big for a family of two. That leaves lots of opportunities for soup and for canning.

Lamb soup

Lamb soup is a rare treat for me, because of the limited supply and high cost of lamb’s meat.

Rabbit Soup

I will probably never use the 'nice' parts of a fresh rabbit for soup, no matter how old it is. They go in the stew pot instead.

On the other hand, parting a fresh rabbit always leaves the head, spine and ribcage and those make very good soup. Canned rabbit always ends up as soup, and that soup is even richer than the freshly made.

Same-level Links

recipe page links

Chapter 1.2. Meat Soups