cozy chicken and farro soup
While classic homemade chicken noodle soup is great for healing—mostly because of the collagen-rich bone broth that tends to be its prerequisite—it is not usually my preferred soup during the moments in which I decide to Get Really Serious about my health plan. Tiny pieces of carrot are the least-vegetable vegetable in the vegetable kingdom, and celery really is, as social media has recently put it, just “water with hair in it,” but the issue I have sometimes with chicken noodle is that a good one is bound to have a lot of noodles, and at that point it is just… liquidy pasta. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, let me be clear. I love liquidy pasta. But we need to be honest with ourselves here, and not every night is meant to be pasta night.
Here, we are doing chicken soup according to the gospel of health food, adapting my grandma chicken soup template with its big chunky vegetables but ditching the noodles completely, and instead using the comparably wholesome farro—rustic little pearls of fiber and protein—to give the soup body and texture. Farro comes in two varieties: a stubborn, old-school variety that takes an hour to soften, and quick-cooking ones designed for convenience. You can use either one in this recipe, but as quick-cooking farro seems slightly more common, I’ve written the recipe to make use of it.
Given we’re already making alterations to a classic anyway, I’ve also altered the broth technique to skip one step I find annoying: straining it, which dirties several more dishes as well as, usually, the counter. To do that, we are working with large identifiable pieces you can easily pull from the broth later. You lay skin-on chicken (I recommend thighs) in the bottom of a dutch oven, along with whole peeled garlic cloves, a whole carrot, a halved onion with the skin, a celery stick, dill stems, salt, pepper, and bay leaves, and bring it up to a boil. Then you do nothing: just leave it alone to simmer for about an hour and a half until the chicken has produced a silky, golden broth. You then remove everything from the soup: shredding your chicken, smashing your garlic, and discarding everything else. Behold, clear broth! Then, finally, you add your chopped vegetables, farro, chopped dill fronds that came from those stems you used earlier. You do have to scavenge a bit to get all the stems and stuff out, but think of it like a treasure hunt. It’s a Wednesday night. What else do we really have to do?
Substitution notes
You can swap some of the chicken thighs for bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts in this recipe, but they will cook faster, where the thighs will need the full hour. Same deal if you use a whole chicken. I didn’t feel like dealing with monitoring the cook-time differential, so I used all thighs to make it easier.
Boneless, skinless chicken thighs will technically work here, but you will have a very weak broth (the skin and bones give it a lot of its body). You will want to supplement with a spoonful of Better Than Bouillon or use pre-made chicken stock instead of water. This is an un-subtle way of asking you to please use bone-in chicken if you make this recipe! It just isn’t the same otherwise.
Feel free to swap the farro for barley or some other chewy, wholesome grain. Originally this recipe was conceived for barley, but it had an expiration date of 2018 and smelled like a moth wing when I went to use it, so it went into the trash and instead farro, the understudy, got to shine.
If you’d prefer to use the slow-cooking version of farro (or barley, for that matter), add that when you assemble the soup at step 2. Simmer for the same amount of time as directed; it will be tender at the 50 minute minimum, but can certainly go for longer.
Yes, you can totally substitute the farro for noodles and I won’t tell anybody. This is still the easiest chicken soup recipe I’ve ever made, so why not?
RECIPE
Classic chicken soup with homemade broth and lots of dill, with sturdy farro instead of noodles. Wholesome and healing even in the dreariest, darkest parts of winter.
Effortful time: 20 minutes
Total time: budget at least 2 hours
Makes 6 medium bowls
YOU NEED
For the base soup
2 1/2 lbs. bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
6 cloves of garlic, peeled and left whole
1 baseball-sized onion, cut in half, skins left on
2 bay leaves
5 sprigs of dill; fronds and stems separated
1 celery stalk, whole
1 carrot, peeled, whole
16 cups of cold water, divided
1 tbsp. white wine vinegar
4 tsp. sea salt
Black pepper, to taste
16 cups of cold water
To finish
1 cup quick-cooking farro
2 additional cups of water
Carrots, as many as you want, chopped
Celery, as much as you want, chopped
A few tbsp. of chopped dill fronds
make it
Do some prep. Halve an onion through the root end (not the equator—doing it through the root helps keep the onion pieces intact), keeping the skin on. Separate dill fronds from 5 dill stems; chop the fronds and set them aside, keeping the stems. Lightly whack 6 cloves of garlic with a knife and peel off the skins, leaving the garlic whole. Chop the vegetables you’d like to use for the soup and set them aside, but leave one whole carrot and one celery stalk whole to use in the broth.
Assemble the soup base. Nestle your chicken thighs into the bottom of a large stock pot or dutch oven (7-8 quart). Add the peeled whole garlic, the onions and skins, the 5 dill stems, 2 bay leaves, the carrot and celery stalk you left whole, 1 tbsp. of white wine vinegar (this is to help leech some of the minerals out of the bones; you won’t taste it in the finished soup), 4 tsp. sea salt, and a few twirls of black pepper. Cover with 14 cups of cold water (you’ll add the final two cups at the end) and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. This can take up to a half an hour, so be patient! Once you hit a boil, lower to a simmer.
Simmer the soup for a minimum of 50 minutes, or up to 2 hours. This will slowly braise the chicken to fall-apart-tender status and create a rich broth. Turn it down if it starts bubbling too furiously—not even my cat likes tough boiled chicken.
Remove all the extra stuff from the broth. Using tongs, remove the chicken thighs to a board. Then fish around and pull the celery, carrot, bay leaves, onion halves, and dill stems out of the broth; toss these. You should now be easily able to spot the garlic cloves, smash these with your spoon into the side of the pot. They will fall apart easily.
Finish the soup. Add 1 cup of quick-cook farro, 2 more cups of water, and your chopped vegetables to the soup. Bring the soup back to a simmer for 10 minutes or until the vegetables are tender-crisp. While it simmers, shred the chicken into bite-sized pieces; discard the skin and bones. Stir in the shredded chicken and let cook 2 minutes longer. Ladle into bowls and top with the reserved chopped dill fronds.