Souplantation Chicken Noodle Soup

Home reconstruction

Souplantation — Sweet Tomatoes outside California — closed permanently in 2020, and that is why you are here. The chain shut its doors during the pandemic and never reopened, so there is no menu to check and no product to compare against.

That means this is a reconstruction with no way to verify it. Worth saying plainly rather than implying otherwise.

What made theirs distinctive

From how the soup was described and what people remember about it, three things set it apart from a standard chicken noodle:

Thick egg noodles, wide and flat, not the thin dried noodles in a supermarket soup. That is most of the texture memory people have.

A properly rich broth. It tasted like it had been made with chicken, not stock cubes — a lot of body and a slightly cloudy look.

Big vegetable pieces. Chunky rather than the fine dice you get in canned soup.

None of that is complicated. It just takes slightly longer than opening a tin.

What you need

• 1.5 litres good chicken stock — homemade if you have it
• 450 g chicken thighs, boneless and skinless
• 3 carrots, cut into thick coins
• 3 celery sticks, cut into thick slices
• 1 onion, diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 200 g wide egg noodles
• 2 tbsp butter
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 2 bay leaves
• salt and black pepper
• a handful of parsley, chopped

Thighs rather than breast. Breast goes stringy in soup; thigh stays tender and adds fat to the broth, which is where the body comes from.

Method

1. 1. Melt the butter in a large pot. Soften the onion, carrot and celery for 6–8 minutes, until the onion is translucent. Do not brown them — this is a pale soup and browning changes the character.
2. 2. Add the garlic, thyme and bay. One minute more.
3. 3. Pour in the stock and add the chicken thighs whole.
4. 4. Simmer gently for 20 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through.
5. 5. Lift the chicken out, shred it with two forks, and return it to the pot.
6. 6. Cook the noodles separately in salted water, and add them to bowls rather than to the pot. This is the important one — see below.
7. 7. Season, and stir the parsley through at the end.

Cook the noodles separately

Egg noodles left in soup keep absorbing liquid. Within an hour they are bloated and the broth has halved; by the next day it is a solid mass.

Cook them separately, put a portion in each bowl, ladle soup over. Leftovers then keep properly, and you cook fresh noodles when you reheat.

Every restaurant soup you have had works this way. It is not a shortcut, it is how it is done.

Getting more body

If the broth tastes thin, the stock was thin. Two fixes:

Simmer the chicken longer, 30 minutes rather than 20, with the bones in if you have them.

Reduce it. Take the lid off and let it cook down by a fifth before adding anything back.

Do not thicken it with flour. That makes a different soup.

Storing

Four days in the fridge, without noodles. It freezes for three months, again without noodles.