Saturday, February 29, 2020

Chicken Noodle Soup

One of my parent's remedies for nearly anything that ailed us as kids, was chicken noodle soup.  It is still my 'go to' soup for times when I am feeling a bit under the weather.  Or for when I just want a bowl of soup.

The price of a can of soup has increased considerably since I was young.  When a person is living on a fixed income, price often matters.  The ingredients matter as well, and I am getting more and more interested in the chemicals included in processed foods.  I would rather know for sure what I am consuming.

So I made my own soup and canned it.

Frozen boneless, skinless chicken breast was on sale so I got nine pounds.  The easiest way for me to cook that amount was to spread the meat out on parchment paper lined cookie sheets and bake until they were cooked through.  After the meat cooled, I cut it into about 1/2 inch dices.

Each pint jar got 1/2 cup of chicken, 2 chicken bouillon cubes, a 1/2 teaspoon each of celery powder and onion powder (both made by grinding up my dehydrated celery and onions) and water enough to leave about 1 inch of headspace.  The soup was processed in my pressure canner for 65 minutes at 10 lbs. pressure for my elevation.  I got 36 pints of soup and have enough chicken left over to mix with the leftover BBQ sauce from canning BBQ pork and can that for BBQ chicken sandwich filling.

Pasta doesn't can well, so when the jars of soup had cooled overnight and had been washed and labeled, I broke angel hair pasta into about 1 inch pieces, put a heaping 1/4 cup of pasta into snack sized ziploc bags and taped the pasta bags to the outside of each jar.

I taste tested a jar of the soup, adding the pasta to cook while the soup heated.  I have to admit, it is some really good chicken noodle soup.  Unlike commercially canned chicken noodle soup, this soup has plenty of chicken pieces and even using the bouillon cubes, it doesn't have a salty taste.

Comfort food in a jar.  Doesn't get much better than that.  

8 comments:

  1. Sounds yummy and I'm sure way better than store bought.

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    1. One Family...The soup turned out better than I had hoped it would. I will be canning this again.

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  2. That sounds delicious. I am not much of a chicken noodle soup person, but I keep a can or two all the time. I might eat more if it had more chicken and were homemade. Good job.

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    1. Thanks, Linda...I like this better than store bought soup. You are right about the amount of chicken. The commercially canned soup has maybe a couple of tiny pieces in it. This has as much as you want to put in.

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  3. Modern canned soup seems to be mostly SALT.

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    1. Gorges...Thst's one reason I decided to try canning my own. The bouillon cubes add enough salt so none extra is needed and the soup doesn't taste at all salty.

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  4. We don't eat enough soup. Nobody can decide what to have. I asked my son who worked at an egg farm about, what they do with the chickens after they don't lay eggs anymore..He said its grade B and its used in soups.. I never knew that....

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  5. Rob...I didn't know that either, but it makes sense. I can soup mostly in pint jars because one jar is just right for a meal for one person. If you canned several kinds of soup, everybody could have the kind they like.

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