Chicken Lemon Rice Soup [Supe me Pule]
This Chicken Lemon Rice Soup is one of the best soups for when you're feeling sick or on a cold winter day. This soup is typical in several Mediterranean and Balkan countries.
Servings 6 people
Ingredients
- 1 leftover rotisserie chicken
- 10 cups water
- 2 celery stocks
- 1 yellow onion
- 3 eggs
- 1 cup rice (pearl rice or short grain rice is best)
- 1 lemon
- 1 tsp salt
- 0.5 tbsp oregano
- 2 tbsps chopped fresh parsley optional for decoration
- butter (optional)
- black pepper (optional)
Instructions
- Add leftover rotisserie chicken in a big pot. Add 8 cups of water and set temp to high.
- In the meantime clean and chop celery in big pieces, I cut the celery sticks in half. Peel onion, rinse and cut in about 4 big pieces. Add that to pot too.
- Once water starts to boil, lower temperature to medium and cover the pot. Let boil for about 30 minutes.
- Turn heat off. Remove chicken and place in a deep plate or platter. Let it cool enough to handle by hand.
- Strain the chicken stock. You can throw away the remains from straining the stock. Keep about 1 - 1.5 cups of stock aside and pour the rest of the stock in the pot.
- Add 2 more cups of water to the pot.
- When chicken is cool to handle by hand, start removing all pieces of chicken from the carcass. Believe me there's enough chicken in there for a whole meal. When removed by hand they're usually bite size which is perfect for the soup.
- Turn heat on to medium. Add chicken bites back into the stock. When stock starts to boil, add rice, oregano, and salt. Let it boil so the rice cooks. Once finished cooking and you have tested for salt and adjusted to taste, turn heat to simmer.
- Whisk the eggs in a deep bowl. Juice the lemon and add to the eggs, keep whisking.
- Get the stock you put aside earlier, it might still be warm but it shouldn't be hot, otherwise the eggs will curdle.
- Pour 1-2 ozs of stock into the bowl at a time with your left hand while you're still whisking with your right hand. You want the warm stock to raise the temperature of the eggs slowly so they don't curdle. Once you are done with this process then you can grab a ladle of stock/rice and add to the bowl too, whisk vigorously.
- Pour the egg-lemon-stock mix into the soup and stir well. Let the soup get hot but don't take it back to boiling temperature because eggs might curdle. Serve warm. Add sliced lemon, parsley and black pepper on the soup bowl to taste.
Notes
- You can use frozen chicken, just make sure you thaw completely before hand. If using frozen or fresh chicken, just make sure to boil long enough that the chicken is cooked internally. The above instructions are for rotisserie chicken which comes already cooked.
- I use an electric kettle to warm up the water, so the 10 cups of water used throughout the recipe are hot. It speeds some of the process up.
- Original recipe from my grandparents calls for black pepper to be sprinkled in the pot same time as oregano but I'm afraid my kids won't like it, so I add black pepper on individual soup bowls at home and that's how I'm writing the recipe. But I wanted you to be aware that you can add black pepper into the pot to cook.
- Cooking time from beginning to end can take anywhere from 1hr to 1.5 hrs depending how long you let the chicken chill before you can strip it to throw back into the pot.
- My grandfather liked adding some burnt butter on his soup bowl so that's why I added butter as optional in the recipe ingredients. However, I personally feel that the chicken stock has enough fat that I don't need the butter. But it sure did smell good!!!