This easy chicken corn soup recipe is a family favorite taught to me by my mom years ago. I’ve made a few tweaks to the recipe over the years to make it even more nourishing. I love that this chicken corn soup can be made in about half an hour. That’s especially helpful when I need a quick, healthy lunch or last minute healthy dinner idea! I often make a big pot of chicken corn soup so we can freeze some for quick and easy meals in the future. What makes our chicken corn soup even more nourishing is when we use chicken we raised on our homestead, homemade chicken broth, and homegrown veggies like onions, carrots, corn and garlic.
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This chicken corn soup can be made completely gluten free for those who need to follow a gluten free diet. Our family isn’t gluten free so we like to add in homemade rivels, or what my husband calls “knoodle” which is the German word for it that he grew up with (I’m not even going to attempt to spell the word in German though!” Basically they are mini dumplings cooked in broth. We sometimes omit the rivels from our chicken corn soup if I happen to also bake bread the same day we eat soup so instead rivels we enjoy slices of fresh bread with our soup.
We like to roast a chicken about once a month (here’s our favorite recipe to roast a chicken). We have one meal with roasted chicken. Then we remove as much of the meat from the bones and use the bones to make a batch of nourishing homemade chicken bone broth. Once the bone broth is finished cooking, we’re able to glean even more meat from the bones. We shred all the chicken we remove from the bones and freeze it in 2 cup quantities using our beloved vacuum sealer. Then when we’re cooking a meal that needs shredded chicken, all we have to do is pull out our pack of frozen shredded chicken, thaw and start cooking!
Easy Chicken Corn Soup Recipe:
Soup ingredients:
-2 cups shredded chicken (leftover Thanksgiving turkey also works quite well in this recipe!)
-8 cups chicken bone broth (here’s how to easily make your own nourishing bone broth)
-1 TBS butter or olive oil
-1 large onion chopped small
-1 cup chopped celery (may include chopped celery leaves too)
-1 cup sliced carrots (I try to slice them no wider than 1/4″ thick so they cook faster)
-2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
-2 1/2 cups sweet corn
-salt and pepper to taste
Optional Rivel ingredients:
-1 cup flour
-1/4 cup milk
-1 egg beaten
Directions:
- In a large soup pot, heat the butter or olive oil. Add and saute the onion, celery, carrots, and garlic for a few minutes or until the onions turn translucent.
- Add the chicken broth, chicken and corn. Bring to a boil then reduce the heat to medium/low.
- Cook for about 10-15 minutes or until the carrots are soft. Salt and pepper to taste.
- If making rivels: While the soup is cooking, mix together the flour, milk and egg with a fork. It will be a sticky dough.
- About five minutes before the soup is done cooking, drop the rivel dough by teaspoon size blobs into the hot broth. Cook for five minutes. The rivels will cook and float on the surface of the soup.
- Once the soup is done, ladle into soup bowls, serve and enjoy!
If you want to make a large batch to have extra leftovers, you can easily double the recipe. You can freeze the soup for future meals and the rivels freeze well in the soup too. We reuse plastic yogurt tubs to freeze the soup and fill them to about 1″ from the top to allow for expansion once the soup freezes. Once the soup has cooled off, we ladle soup into the yogurt tubs, put a lid on, label them and put them in the freezer. To thaw the chicken corn soup, remove it from the freezer the day before you want to use it and let it thaw in the refrigerator. If you pull the soup from the freezer for a last minute meal, it can be thawed and reheated in a pot on the stove. Chicken corn soup is another one of those leftovers I love to reheat and cook on the top of our wood stove so we don’t have to use our kitchen stove!
Rivels reminds me of the chicken corn soup my mother makes back in Pennsylvania. It is similar to yours except she adds pieces of hard boiled eggs. Great soup that I don’t see much in Montana.
Pennsylvania is actually where my mom learned this recipe! My mom’s original recipe also includes the chopped pieces of hard boiled eggs. My family never liked this addition to the soup so over the years I stopped adding it the recipe we make
Not adding the hard boiled eggs is a good idea if you want to freeze some of the soup. The egg whites get a little like rubber after freezing.