The Ultimate Chicken Noodle Soup Only Needs 2 Ingredients

A Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else: flavor, creativity, wow factor. Psst—we don't count water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (specifically, 1/2 cup or less of olive oil, vegetable oil, and butter), since we're guessing you have those covered. Today, we’re making the most minimalist chicken stock, then turning it into noodle soup.

Chicken soup is easy to enjoy—especially if it’s cold outside or you’re feeling sick—but it isn’t easy to make. Or, that’s what I assumed for most of my life.

Maybe it was all the ingredients that my mom bought, washed, peeled, and chopped every time she made it, or the fact that the whole recipe took her the whole day. That’s why, when I was growing up, my family saved chicken soup for special occasions, like the first day of school, or a holiday, or if one of us was sick.

But if you’re like me, you want chicken soup way more often than that.

So, how do you make it simple enough for any week—but so delicious that you want it every week? I sorted through countless chicken stock and chicken soup recipes to figure out how to streamline the process while keeping the flavor. The common thread is that good chicken soup starts with good chicken stock*, and good chicken stock follows this basic formula: chicken, liquid, and any aromatics (more on those soon), all simmered for a long time.

*As far as we're concerned, the difference between stock and broth is that you cook with stock and consume broth. But for the purpose of this piece—in which stock becomes broth by being added to a bowl—we're using stock for clarity.

My soup goals are threefold: a super-flavorful chicken stock, tender shredded chicken (white and dark meat, please), and bouncy egg noodles. But how can we achieve these with as few ingredients as possible?

Back to those aromatics. Most chicken stocks have a whole slew of aromatics, or various vegetables, herbs, and spices, which simmer along with the chicken:

• Onion, carrot, and celery are classic. Also used: parsnips, leeks, scallions, and fennel, plus punchy bonuses like ginger and garlic. These can be sautéed first or added to the water raw.
• Parsley, thyme, and bay leaves are popular herbs, but who’s to stop you from using dill, cilantro, or tarragon? You can bundle these in a cute bouquet garni, or not.
• Some like peppercorns for a gentle kick or coriander for lemony brightness. Some don’t.

Whichever aromatics a recipe calls for, the theory is the same: Aromatics round out the stock, creating more complex flavor. Which is true. But they don’t create more chickeny flavor, which is what I’m after. Aromatics will get you oniony flavor. Or carroty flavor, or peppery flavor.

Now, what if instead of cooking all these ingredients in water (which becomes stock), you cook them in stock? Does that lead to even richer flavor? Such is my mom’s go-to method for matzo ball soup—dump store-bought boxes of chicken stock in a pot, add a whole raw chicken, some chopped onion, carrot, celery, and parsnip, and simmer until it tastes just right.

I never knew this technique had a name until this past November, when Helen Rosner wrote about “Double Stock” in The New Yorker. That’s when I started to understand why my mom’s soup tastes so dang good: You’re essentially using more chicken (the chicken from the first stock + the chicken for the double stock), simmering for more time (the first stock’s cook time + the double stock’s cook time), and getting more flavor. Ta-da!

So that’s one way to make flavorful stock. But there are a million other factors one could obsess over. To name a few:

• Which chicken part yields the most flavor? This question is a deep, dark internet rabbit hole. (This Serious Eats article summarizes it well.) Suffice it to say that every chicken part has a different personality (various amounts of fat, connective tissue, and bone) and benefit (flavor or gelatin).
• Will you brown the meat before you cook it or just add it to the pot raw? And if you’re using a whole chicken, will you add it to the water whole, or break it down into pieces, or pulse it in a food processor a la The Food Lab?
• Will you cook the meat just until it’s done, then remove from the pot to eat later, or will you cook it for the entire time, then toss the hopelessly-overcooked meat?

Read enough chicken stock recipes and it starts to seem like the most complicated thing in the whole wide world. Which is why I started to wonder: If the skeleton of all chicken stocks is chicken and water, then what would happen if you just used chicken and water?

The more cookbooks and websites I read, the more I realized how unexplored this question is. The simplest version that I stumbled upon hails from Cooks’ Illustrated, with water, chicken, onion, and bay leaves—two ingredients more than I was interested in.

Of course, I anticipated that if you strip away all the ingredients, then you'd have to overcompensate in the technique. Use twice as much chicken, or brown the meat first, or cook it for 17 hours.

Turns out, none of these were necessary. A little ingredient list and straightforward method still produced a golden, flavorful stock, with lots of tender chicken to boot. Which is to say, the simplest chicken stock, for the simplest chicken noodle soup.

Here's how to do it:

Use a whole chicken. That Cooks’ Illustrated recipe I mentioned above uses "chicken backs and wings." Alton Brown's version calls for "chicken carcasses, including necks and backs." And several other sources are just as scrappy. I know, I know, I should be collecting chicken carcasses and parts in my freezer for spur-of-the-moment stocks. But I don’t. That’s why this recipe uses a whole chicken and calls it a day. Because you’re using all the chicken parts, you get the full range of chickeny flavor, plus plenty of gelatin. And there’s no pre-planning necessary.

Cook it in less water. In Daniel Gritzer's recipe for Basic Chicken Stock, he notes: "Four pounds of chicken for the four quarts of water here is the minimum I've found that will produce a good, flavorful stock." In other words, 1 pound chicken to 1 quart water. This recipe, which uses a 5 1/2 pound chicken and 3 quarts of water, nearly doubles that chicken-to-water ratio. More chicken, more chickeny flavor.

And cook it in two stages. First, simmer the chicken pieces (figure eight to twelve, so they fit better in the pot and cook more evenly) until the meat is cooked-through and tender. Then remove the pieces, pluck off the meat, and get the bones and skin back in the pot. This means the meat and the stock get to cook on their own timelines, and you don’t have to throw away a bunch of overcooked chicken just for flavor’s sake.

8 Warming Recipes to Use Up Your Chicken Stock

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Consider this a weekend project. After the chicken is pulled, the bones and skin will simmer for three to four hours. You don't want to rush this part. A long, leisurely simmer—during which you have to do next to nothing, by the way—is the most crucial step of the recipe.

Season to taste. Our secret weapons here aren’t so secret—salt and schmaltz. Salting at the very end means you won’t inadvertently overseason the stock. And schmaltz is what amps up the sunny color and chickeny flavor. As cookbook author Leah Koenig remarked in The New York Times: “Chicken fat is everything when it comes to soup. You just have to embrace it.” And we will! Add salt and schmaltz, stir, taste. And I mean actually taste it. Does it need more salt? More schmaltz? Repeat until you really love it.

Cook and serve the egg noodles separately. By cooking the noodles in a pot of heavily salted water, you’re giving them a chance to become their best selves. By serving them in the bowls, then ladling the chicken soup on top, you’re ensuring that the noodles don’t overcook and everything is seasoned perfectly. If you add the noodles right to the giant pot of soup, they’ll be mushy before you know it. No thanks.

Keep it simple. Do I sprinkle fresh parsley on top? If I have it around, totally. But before you start reaching for extra ingredients, at least try a spoonful of the original first: pure chicken stock, perfectly cooked shredded chicken, and fat egg noodles. If you’re like me, you’ll have an aha moment when you realize just how satisfying something so minimalist can be. Then, if you have fresh herbs or leftover boiled or roasted vegetables, feel free to add them to your bowl.

Simplest Chicken Noodle Soup

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Ingredients

1	(5 1/2–pound) chicken
12	cups cold water
2	teaspoons salt, plus more to taste and for noodle-boiling
12	ounces extra-wide egg noodles

1	(5 1/2–pound) chicken
12	cups cold water

2	teaspoons salt, plus more to taste and for noodle-boiling
12	ounces extra-wide egg noodles

How do you make chicken soup? Tell us in the comments!