FINAL UPDATE: This post has become pretty unwieldy over the years, so please go to this page for the best and most current version of this recipe! Thanks!
UPDATED AGAIN 9-15-2013 with instructions for making a gluten-free version of this soup!!! See below.
EDITED AGAIN on MARCH 27, 2011! See below.
UPDATED BELOW on NOVEMBER 10, 2010.
A couple of weeks back I posted about my inaugural attempt at making Chicken Wing Soup. Yesterday, I gave it a second attempt, using some of the notions that I had already formulated from Batch Number One, and to my taste buds, this batch was significantly better than Batch Number One. So here is the recipe on which I have now settled:
Ingredients:
1.5 lb cooked chicken
1/2 lb potatoes, cooked and diced
1/4 cup Frank’s hot sauce1 stick unsalted butter
1/2 cup flour32oz Chicken stock
1 cup skim milk
1 cup lowfat sour cream
More Frank’s hot sauce or other hot sauce, to tasteSeasoned croutons for garnish
1. Cook and shred the chicken and marinade in the 1/4 cup hot sauce, the longer the better. (I marinated mine overnight until afternoon, about 18 hours.)
2. Put marinated chicken and potatoes into a crockpot and turn on “High”. Cover and let “crock” while you make the rest of the soup.
3. Melt the butter in a soup pot or stock pot over medium heat.
4. Add 1/2 of the flour and stir until it is completely mixed with the melted butter; then add the rest of the flour and continue stirring the roux until it is the color of light caramel, about three or four minutes.
5. Add the Chicken stock, milk, sour cream, and hot sauce, all at once. Turn up heat a bit, stirring constantly; taste and add more hot sauce if desired. Turn heat up again, and keep adjusting heat up a bit at a time, stirring all the while, until the soup is just reaching a boil. Allow the soup to boil for a minute or so, constantly stirring. (This allows the roux to thicken the soup.)
6. Pour the soup into the crock pot, over the chicken and the potatoes. Stir a few times, cover, and allow to crock on “High” for an hour or so. After that, to keep warm turn the pot down to “Low” until serving.
7. When serving, sprinkle seasoned croutons on top; best eaten with thick slices of crusty bread with butter. Even better with a cold beer!
Notice that this time I omitted the aromatics, opting not to saute onions and celery in the roux before adding the stock, milk and cream. I may go back to doing this in the future; this probably does make for a more complexly flavorful soup. This time I was mainly interested in getting the consistency and flavor exactly right, and this formula resulted in a really good product. I made this for a potluck dinner at church last night. I went in with a crockpot full of soup. I came home with a nearly empty crockpot. That tells me something.
UPDATE 11-10-10 and 3-27-11: OK, I can’t ever quit tinkering. So I decided to try something a bit different when I made the soup again this weekend past.
I love the flavor of the soup as prepared above, but the one thing that always vexes me is that it doesn’t totally blend together the way I want it to — what I think happens is that the sour cream never really integrates into the soup, but rather breaks apart into a whole bunch of really tiny bits that are suspended in the rest of the liquid. This doesn’t really impact the flavor, but the creamy consistency is never quite what I want it to be.
So when I decided to make the soup again the other day, I thought of a change to make. I left out the sour cream, and instead used half-and-half. So, here is my newest formulation of the soup!
3-27-11: I’ve added details on optional aromatics to add to the soup. It’s in italics in the recipe below.
Ingredients:
1.5 lb chicken, cooked and shredded
1/2 lb potatoes, cooked and diced
1/4 cup Frank’s hot sauceOptional Aromatics:
1 small onion, diced
2 stalks celery, diced
1 carrot, shredded1 stick unsalted butter
1/2 cup flour32oz Chicken stock (I use a “No sodium added” brand. This dish doesn’t really need any additional salt.)
1 cup skim milk
1 cup half-and-half
More Frank’s hot sauce or other hot sauce, to tasteSeasoned croutons for garnish
1. Cook and shred the chicken and marinade in the 1/4 cup hot sauce, the longer the better. (I marinated mine overnight until afternoon, about 18 hours.)
2. Put marinated chicken and potatoes into a crockpot and turn on “High”. Cover and let “crock” while you make the rest of the soup.
3. Melt the butter in a soup pot or stock pot over medium heat.
4. Add 1/2 of the flour and stir until it is completely mixed with the melted butter; then add the rest of the flour and continue stirring the roux until it is the color of light caramel, about three or four minutes.
4a. If you wish to use the Optional aromatics — and I do recommend it — add them to the roux at this point and stir them about for several minutes, until tender, allowing their flavor to sweat out.
5. Add the Chicken stock, milk, sour cream, and hot sauce, all at once. Turn up heat a bit, stirring constantly; taste and add more hot sauce if desired. Turn heat up again, and keep adjusting heat up a bit at a time, stirring all the while, until the soup is just reaching a boil. Allow the soup to boil for a minute or so, constantly stirring. (This allows the roux to thicken the soup.)
6. Pour the soup into the crock pot, over the chicken and the potatoes. Stir a few times, cover, and allow to crock on “High” for an hour or so. After that, to keep warm turn the pot down to “Low” until serving.
7. When serving, sprinkle seasoned croutons on top; best eaten with thick slices of crusty bread with butter. Even better with a cold beer!
Basically, it’s the same recipe except with half-and-half replacing the sour cream. This resulted in a much nicer, creamier, more consistent texture to the soup. I suppose that you could go farther and use 2 cups of half-and-half, or if you really want a rich dish, use heavy cream. But I don’t think the dish needs that much fat.
UPDATE 9-15-2013: If you need a gluten-free version of this soup, fret not! Omit the making of the roux above. Just leave it out. I’d still saute the aromatic veggies in the butter, just for richness, but do not use the flour. Instead, just make the soup without the roux. Then, toward the end of the cooking process (you can do this anytime when you’re about to serve), whisk a bit of cornstarch into a cup of cold milk or heavy cream, and then stir that into the soup to thicken it. And hey, you might not even need to do that, if you like the consistency without the thickeners at all.
Okay, I am not a natural cook, so I have to ask… do you weigh out the chicken and potatoes before or after you cook them? Or doesn’t it matter?
Fair questions! For this go-round I bought a 1.5 lb package of chicken and cooked that, so the weight of cooked chicken was probably less. I also bought a 16 oz package of pre-diced and cooked potatoes and used half of it; hence the 1/2 lb there. You can add more chicken and more potato if you like, though.
It is, I beleive, convention that weights in recipes are all stated pre-cooking.
This recipe sounds delicious. I’ma hafta try it.
Why no bleu-cheese in your recipe?? I'm positive that Danny's has it in there recipe. I'm gonna give yours a try but add bleu-cheese.
I have had Danny's soup a million times, and I have never detected a bleu cheese taste…
Perhaps using crumbled bleu as a garnish with the croutons?