The Chicken Soup Mistake Andrew Zimmern Wants Us To Avoid

If you drew a Venn diagram to show the relationship between home remedies and comfort foods, chicken noodle soup would fall smack dab in the middle. Hearty, warming, and packed with nostalgia, homemade chicken soup is vital for those days when you're feeling under the weather, and perfect for a quick lunch or weeknight dinner. You don't need to be a chef to make a pot of chicken soup either, because most recipes are very simple, and almost every culture has its own classic variation. There are a few common mistakes to avoid, however, including a tip from Andrew Zimmern, one of which is to avoid using too many vegetables.

While it's true that most chicken soup and broth needs some onions and carrots and also usually a few bits of celery, the host of "Bizarre Foods" and author of "Spilled Milk" told The Kitchn, ​​"They make the broth too sweet, and not chicken-y enough." For the most savory broth, stick to using only one or two of each vegetable for a large stovetop-sized batch of soup.

You may have heard somewhere that the foundation for many dishes, including soup, is mirepoix. This combination of diced or chopped onions, carrots, and celery is a classic combination of vegetables that has been used for hundreds of years to give recipes flavor and depth. Without them, a chicken soup would taste like flat, boiled chicken. The trouble is, you can go overboard with the veggies and have too much of a good thing.

Onions and carrots bring a lot of aroma and color to the table, but they both also contain a lot of natural sugar in the form of fructose because they're root vegetables (plants tend to store a lot of starch in their roots). This is what makes caramelized onions and carrot juice both taste sweet. So if you use too many carrots and onions in your chicken soup broth, you'll lose the savory core of what makes the soup taste the way it's supposed to. Zimmern suggests using only two onions, two ribs of celery, and two carrots for every six quarts of water when you're making chicken broth.

Using fewer vegetables in a batch of chicken broth does not translate over to using chicken, however. In fact, the more chicken you can squeeze into the soup pot the better, according to Zimmern. He frequently makes his chicken soups by starting with a whole chicken in a pot on the stove, or if you're working with a carcass or cut-up pieces he's also a big fan of adding any parts of the bird that might get thrown away like heads and feet. "All those other parts have lots of gelatin, and lots of glucosamine and chondroitin, and lots of flavonoids that make your stock better," he said on TikTok.

@andrew.zimmern

This is how I make my favorite chicken stock... it's a great way to reduce food waste by using the entire bird #familyfavorites #andrewzimmern

♬ original sound – Andrew Zimmern

Not only will you get a lot of extra flavor in your broth by using the whole bird, but you'll also cut down on food waste. Just make sure to strain all those bits away from the broth and pick off all the edible meat before you start assembling your soup so that you don't get any pieces of bone or cartilage in your bowl. Then all you have left to do is decide if your soup needs noodles, rice, or matzo balls.