Chicken Soup Season – Jewish Style
It’s that time of the year. Cold and flu season, with a twist of Covid. We get Winter colds every year, but g-d forbid this year anyone hears you cough! I know I do not have Covid as I check my senseof taste every 20 minutes during waking hours!
This recipe was handed down from my Grandmother to my mother, and the whole family loves it. My nieces and nephews think my mom’s is the best, but my cousins and siblings agree, Grandma Sophie’s Chicken Soup was by far the best ever made on the planet Earth!
I am just glad my son likes mine! I hope I get to make it for his kids some day, but won’t it be awkward when they call it Grandma Mitch’s Chicken Soup!
I use a huge pot so I can freeze containers of soup for the next month. Sort of like how a hoarder cooks!
Jewish Chicken Soup Directions
- Put flanken (or beef short ribs) in a pot with just enough water to cover it.
- Boil the flanken 5 minutes or so until fat/skim comes to top for you to remove all. Set aside to cool.
- Clean chicken well. All of it goes into the soup except for the liver.
- Cut carrots in 3-4″ pieces.
- Line bottom of pot with bones, then beef, then chicken, then dill, then parsley, celery, onions, potato, turnip, and carrots. Add cold water (it is a scientific fact that cold water works best, something to do with the collagen in the bones) to cover.
- Bring water to a boil and watch so you can remove top fat constantly before covering, then let simmer/slow boil for 3 hours. Add salt and pepper to taste.
- When soup is ready, strain ingredients keeping soup separate. Save carrots separately in container and then eat or discard what you don’t want. I eat it all!
As stated earlier, this is an old Jewish chicken soup recipe, so it calls for kosher chicken, which is salted as part of the koshering process. Regular chicken will require more salt.
This is a two day process.
Day 2 of Grandma Sophie’s Chicken Soup Recipe:
Refrigerate your soup over night so that the fat will rise to the top. Remove the fat. Soup tastes better on the second day! We eat it with thin egg noodles, not rice, not dumplings and not matzoh balls!
My grandma passed away in 2001, and I will always miss her, and I will always remember her chicken soup, made with love, just as they say. My mom now makes this recipe, and all her grandchildren are building these same memories, they love this soup!
This is a wonderful family tradition with the Grandparent cooking love right into the soup! I am just sad that my son never got to meet my Grandma, she was the best. She was GiGi Sophie to the great grandkids, and yes, she always had her Ricky Martin calendar behind her!
This soup is more than a food, it is a bowl of memories!
Diane Sabatini says
Great story! Food can take us back to a moment and make us feel what we felt in that time.