Not Your Mother’s Chicken Soup

What’s cooking? Asian Chicken Soup with Lettuce, Rice, & Ginger

This is the week when you really don’t want to have to work at putting food on the table. Between the menu planning and the ordering and the shopping and the decisions on how to decorate the table, there’s not really much energy left for the meals leading up to Turkey Day. But we all have to eat, even on those other days.

Ta-da! Kitchen Goddess to the rescue. Today’s recipe relies on the simplest of ingredients, tastes amazing, and comes together in less than 30 minutes, including the prep work. Really. Would the KG lie to you?

The back story started with a recipe hunt – something I do way too often. Frankly, any random occurrence can send me off wandering around the internet, looking up food. This time, it was for tempura green beans. I’d had a marvelous plate of them at a restaurant, and as I thought about them a couple of days later in my kitchen, I turned instinctively to my iPad, where I cruised the web for a good half hour to find a way to cook them. I’m still looking for one that doesn’t involve a large of amount of boiling oil, and I’ll let you know when I find one.

But while I was looking, I noticed a tiny window down in a corner of my screen. Some chef was throwing a bunch of ingredients into a pot, and it looked really good, but there was no sound because I wasn’t really on that page looking for what that chef was making.

Just as I went in for a closer look, the video changed, and I found myself watching a YouTube of Colin Josts’s best moments on Saturday Night Live. Now I think Colin Jost is hilarious, but I experienced a mild panic because I didn’t know where that first clip came from. Grrrr... 

Several frenetic back arrows and google searches later, I did find that clip, because – and you’ll love this – I recognized the chef! The dish was a chicken soup, using ingredients I had on hand, so I made it. And ate the whole thing myself. Then I made it again and served it to my hubby, who turned to me mid-bowl and said, “This is delicious! What is it?”

I’ve now made it several more times, finally managing to take photos in the process, because we normally scarf it down so fast there’s nothing left to point the camera at.

So..., chicken soup, eh? You are probably asking yourself what could possibly make chicken soup new and exciting. Well, unless your mother is (or was) Asian, this chicken soup will be a completely new experience – and maybe even then.

The chef was J. Kenji López-Alt, author of The Food Lab and the principal food scientist for the Serious Eats (seriouseats.com) website. He’s the son of a German-American father and a Japanese mother, and the López is from his wife, who is Colombian. So he’s got serious multinational food creds. This soup is decidedly Asian in flavor.

What I love most about it is that it uses a handful of ingredients that often sit in my fridge until I decide it’s too late: leftover rice (mostly from Chinese takeout), leftover rotisserie chicken, and an extra head of lettuce from one of those bags with three small heads of romaine. That will no longer be a problem, because I’ll just make the soup.

The rice here is a brown/white combo, and note the jar of Better Than Bouillon, my new fave.

Almost forgot 
about the fish sauce

Beyond those three, there’s really just the ginger and Thai fish sauce, both of which I try to always have on hand. (The Kitchen Goddess keeps a ziplock bag of ginger root in the freezer.) And I’m just hoping you have Thai fish sauce in the fridge. If not, you should get some, because it’s very umami and lasts forever.

Anyway, this recipe requires dedicated mis en place, because once you have the ingredients together, the “cooking” part takes literally less than 10 minutes.

So about the lettuce. I know, it was a surprise even to the Kitchen Goddess that you can cook lettuce and end up with something good. As it happens, cooked lettuce has long been part of French and Chinese cuisine. And despite its mild flavor, the lettuce in this soup is sort of the secret ingredient, texture-wise. If you cook it just until the leaves wilt, the lightly cooked stalks still have a bit of crunch that’s quite fresh-tasting and delicious.

Also, if you have any soup left over for the next day, just heat it and throw in more lettuce. The flavor doesn’t really change from the additional lettuce, and you revive that light crunch as well.

Asian Chicken Soup with Lettuce, Rice and Ginger

Adapted from J. Kenji López-Alt at seriouseats.com

This recipe is a doubling of the original, because I am always happy to have some in the fridge, so I make extra. You can make half if you’d like, but in the end, you’ll wish you’d made more.

Serves 5-6.

Ingredients

2 quarts good chicken stock (or use Better Than Bouillon with water)
2 mounded cups rotisserie chicken (or other leftover chicken), without skin, cut in 1-inch dice
1½ -2 cups leftover rice (white or brown, like Chinese takeout, or whatever plain rice is in the fridge)
6 slices raw ginger, ⅛-inch thick (peeled or not – I prefer peeled)
4 teaspoons Thai fish sauce
½ teaspoon ground white pepper*
Kosher salt to taste
1 small head romaine lettuce, sliced 1 inch-wide

Garnishes:
7-8 scallions, white and light green parts, thinly sliced
½ cup (loosely packed) cilantro, chopped

*Kitchen Goddess note on white pepper vs black: In a test run by Cook’s Illustrated, they made two pots of a soup that traditionally calls for white pepper, using a teaspoon of black pepper in one batch and a teaspoon of white pepper in the other. Tasters reported that the one with black pepper was more aromatic and had more spicy heat, but they preferred the soup with white pepper for its floral, earthy flavor and greater complexity. So you can use either in this soup, but the taste may not be quite the same.

Directions
In a large saucepan, heat the stock with the chicken, the rice, the ginger, and the fish sauce, until it comes to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer for about 5 minutes.

Add the lettuce. Let the soup simmer until the lettuce leaves are wilted. Add salt to taste. (Depending on the saltiness of your broth, it’ll need a lot, a little, or none, so taste carefully.)

Add the garnishes. If you like the flavor of raw scallions, serve the soup in a cup or bowl and sprinkle the scallions and cilantro on top. The Kitchen Goddess prefers her scallion flavor to be a little milder, so she adds her scallions to the soup while it is still simmering, then immediately turns off the heat. Serve the soup in a cup or bowl and sprinkle the cilantro on top.

One final note: If you are serving the soup to guests, you may want to remove the ginger slices, as they don’t really taste good. For yourself or your family, just tell them to pick the ginger out.

Now, how easy was that?!