Chicken soup is good for your health, your soul, and your pocket book. This chicken soup recipe is easy and cheap to make, and since it's made with bone broth, it will help you stay healthy all year long!
Not only is chicken bone broth simple to make, it also has a much milder flavor than beef or pork bone broth, and can be used in a variety of recipes as a replacement for water, or milk.
And to sweeten the deal, it's WAY CHEAPER than beef bone broth too! With just one whole chicken, we have enough food for 10 meals!
My husband is determined that we drink/eat bone broth everyday. He's right, of course, it's an amazing super food, ridiculously good for you, and fairy cheap to make...
Since we are keeping our food budget under $200 a month while keeping everything healthy and organic, I really have to be careful about what I'm making every meal.
I'm happy to say that this delicious chicken soup helps me hit all my budget and nutrition goals with ease!
Just one grass-fed, organic, whole chicken makes enough bone broth, and yields enough meat for 20 servings of chicken noodle soup!
The price breakdown while be different depending on how much your chickens cost, but for us, that breaks down to less than $1.00 per serving!
That's so cheap!! And it's a great dish to keep your family growing in all the right ways.
Easy Chicken Soup Recipe with Canning Instructions
This chicken soup recipe can be made and eaten right away or canned for later.
A simple recipe, but delicious nonetheless. Only 4 ingredients (plus a few seasonings) work together in perfect harmony to create something so soul satisfying that you won't even realize you're healing your gut at the same time!
If you are not following G.A.P.S., keto, or paleo and just need this to be a gluten free chicken soup, feel free to add gluten free noodles for a yummy chicken noodle soup!
For G.A.P.S. dieters: Omit celery until you are on Full G.A.P.S. Or you can boil the celery with the bones while making the broth base, then remove before creating the final soup.
This chicken soup is best made a day in advance so the flavors can really meld together. However, it is still delicious fresh!
I like to keep a dozen or so jars of this delicious chicken soup sitting on my pantry shelves (along with a few other things, like potatoes, apple butter, and strawberry jam).
Chicken Soup with Canning Instructions
Ingredients
- 1 Whole Chicken Organic, Grassfed (3-5lbs)
- 1 Cup carrots
- 1 Cup celery
- 2 Onions small-medium
- 1.5 Gallons filtered water
If Canning
Instructions
- Bake the chicken in the oven until the internal temperature reaches at least 165°. Be sure to test multiple areas to make sure the reading is accurate!
- Once the chicken is fully cooked, strip as much meat off the bones as you can. We don't worry about keeping the meat "pretty" because I just cut it up for the soup anyway.
- Store the meat in the fridge until the bone broth is finished.
- In a large stock pot, combine at least 1.5 gallons of filtered water and all the chicken bones. You don't have to break these up in any way, just add the whole carcass to the water.
- Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce to medium and maintain a low roll for 6-8 hours. As the bone broth boils, scrape off any foam you see develop on the top. This can cause the bone broth to be bitter and taste "dirty".
- Strain finished bone broth to remove bones. Pour the bone broth back into the large pot.
If you want to eat the soup right away:
- Grab the meat that you removed from the chicken and chop into soup size pieces.
- Chop up 1 cup of each carrot and celery, along with 2 small white onions.
- Add everything to the pot and cook over medium heat until the veggies are soft. Salt and pepper to taste.
- Cook noodles on the side and pour the soup over them when ready to serve. Keeping the noodles separate helps to keep them from soaking up all the broth and getting soggy!
If you want to can the soup for later:
- Now that you have your bones out of the broth, place the bone broth in the fridge. You'll need to let it cool until the fat rises to the top.
- If you can it with all the fat still in the bone broth the fat might creep up the sides and break the seal. And no one wants that!
- Once the fat has solidified on the top, scoop it out and either save it for a different dish, or throw it away. Place bone broth back on the stove and return to slow boil.
- Chop carrots and celery until you have 1 cup of each, chop 2 small-medium onions and mix the veggies in a bowl or measuring cup. Chop chicken into small pieces and keep separate from the veggies.
- Prepare jars as in the Pressure Canning Tutorial.
- Add 1 cup of veggies and 1 cup of chicken to each jar until all is gone.
- Pour hot broth over mean and veggies until jar is full. Leave a 1 inch headspace.
- Process at 10lbs pressure for 90 minutes as described in the Pressure Canning Tutorial.
Carol says
Thanks for sharing your recipe! For the canning part, it says to add one cup of carrots and one cup of celery to each jar, but the overall recipe says it takes a cup of each. Please clarify.
Victoria says
Hi! The canning part says to add “1 cup of veggies to each jar” – by that I mean the mixed vegetables that you created in step 4. Not one cup of EACH vegetable, just one cup of mixed vegetables. I hope that makes sense! :-)
gerald ruppert says
Confused on the vegetable amounts . Recipe calls for 1 cup carrots and 1 cup celery and 2 small onions. That is 3 cups total. How to you make a batch of 6 to 8 qts by adding 1 cup of mixed vegetables to each jar. You won’t have enough vegetables to do that many jars
Victoria says
Hi Gerald, thanks for your question! It always shakes out just fine for me. You’re not packing the cup with veggies, so it’s a “cup”. It’s not like packed brown sugar or anything, but just a decent cup full. I did change the jars listed, because it usually makes 4 or 5 quarts of finished soup, and the extra jars are for any left over broth. Sorry for the confusion and I have updated the recipe to reflect that. :-)