One of Our Favorite End of Summer Soups

Today I'm going to be showing you how to make a delicious chicken and corn soup. This is a great end of summer soup. It's hearty, it has chicken and potatoes in it, and sweet summer corn. But you can also make this in the winter time with frozen corn and it's a great soup. It's really delicious and my husband is a huge fan because he loves corn and he loves when I make this. So let's get right into it. So for our soup I have a big cast iron pot heated up here and I'm going to put three tablespoons of butter in with this because that goes great with corn just instead of oil. So for the base of our soup I'm going to do one red onion or yellow onion and then I'm also going to do two celery ribs. I keep calling them stalks but they are ribs. Both of those I'll make sure are finely diced. I always try to make sure that for soups like this I don't want big chunks of vegetables in it so I try to keep everything relatively small and I'll just add that to our pot. I'm going to add a generous pinch of salt to our onions and celery. Okay so now our corn. So I like to use either frozen corn. Today I'm using a mix just to show you your options. You I'm using six cups of corn so I actually have part frozen here and we have five cups of frozen fire roasted corn which is a great option. This is going to add a ton more flavor so I like to use that. So we'll go ahead and add our five cups of frozen corn. Even if I'm using frozen corn I like to make sure that I have at least one stalk on hand of corn that's fresh because I like to use the cob for flavor. So this is how I cut the corn so it doesn't fly everywhere. That is a thing when cutting corn. I do halfway down first then flip it and go this way and I find that this is the best way to not have the corn literally go all over your floor all over your counter but you can also grill your corn to get more flavor. I'm just trying to make it as simple as possible but there are options to add more flavor. So I'm not throwing these out by the way. These are going to sit to the side until later and this might be over six cups of corn but that's okay and I'm serious. My husband Drew goes crazy for the soup. I don't know what it is but he's had an obsession with corn the entire time that I've known him so I knew he was going to be a fan of me making a corn soup. We'll mix that in with our butter, celery and onions and we're going to do some more salt. Just for reference, I like to use a kosher salt. It's easier to know how much you're adding to the recipe than a fine salt. So we're going to cook the corn and then we have a few other ingredients. So we have a poblano pepper and this you could actually fire roast as well. You could put this on like a gas burner or your grill to add some more flavor. This is nice, it adds kind of like a Tex-Mex type flavor to our corn soup. This is not a spicy pepper. I think if you include the seeds it might kick up the heat a little bit. I really like the poblano in this. We go down to the beach often and a restaurant there has an amazing corn soup and it has poblano in it so I thought it would be a great addition. And all of this we're going to cook together for about four to five minutes. That's why you saute, to create a more depth of flavor. Also we have a doggy daycare at our house right now. We have three dogs. We typically just have one, Hudson that you see, but we have three today and they're all on their best behavior napping right now which is great because I was a little concerned with filming but you might see them around. All right then we're going to add some seasoning. So we're going to do three quarters of a teaspoon of some chili powder and then we're going to do one-eighth of a teaspoon chili flakes and whenever I saw chili flakes in a recipe when I was younger I always thought it meant that the recipe was going to be spicy but that's not the case, especially if you're just using a little bit like this. It is really just to create another layer of flavor in the recipe so just keep that in mind. Don't mix it because you don't want it to be spicy. It's not going to be, especially with one-eighth of a teaspoon. You can of course add more to make it spicy. All right then for a little bit of heartiness we're going to add just four small yellow potatoes and I'm actually not going to peel them and I like to cut these small because pieces of them are going to be in the soup but we are going to blend a portion of the soup so it's just good to keep them small. We don't want, like I said, big chunks in here so when we blend the soup the potatoes add a really nice creaminess without actually using cream. I am not a big fan of adding cream to soups. I just think the potatoes are a nice substitute and I leave the skin on. It just makes it easier and I don't really mind the texture of it in there, especially since we'll be blending some of it. So we'll add that to our pot, stir that in as well. So I'm going to add the potatoes towards the end of our saute time and then when I add the potatoes I'll also add my garlic. We have six cloves of minced garlic. My cloves were massive. They were local garlic and they were huge and once you stir the garlic in, the corn and the garlic, it's just the perfect aroma together. You can really smell the flavors coming together. A little bit of salt in. Then we're also going to add something that I always add to a lot of recipes which is a combination of both onion powder and garlic powder. This is just to help get a little bit more of a concentrated flavor. So a quarter teaspoon each of that. So our vegetables in here are nice and soft. Everything's fragrant and we're now going to add two chicken breasts. So I'll put these right in. I'm going to try not to touch them and that is for protein. You also can make this vegetarian and not include the chicken if you don't want to. Then we're going to do five and a half cups of chicken stock. You can also use half chicken stock, half water because I've been there when I've ran out of chicken stock and not had enough. We have our two cobs that we saved. So if you're using all fresh corn, I do recommend saving at least two of the cobs and we're going to put these in to infuse more corn flavor. I saw that on Top Chef a few years ago and I never forgot it. So I was like I'm gonna use that one day when I make corn soup. So we'll make sure that those corn cobs are in there. Do a little bit more salt, a little bit of black pepper. Now we're going to cover it. The black pepper will mix as it slightly boils in there. We'll let this cook for about 25 to 30 minutes just for the potatoes to soften and the chicken to fully cook. We also want those flavors to develop while the soup cooks. So I'll have this on a very low gentle simmer. Okay, so the soup has been cooking. It looks great. We are going to get rid of our corn cobs. They've done their job in making the soup a little more corny and then what I'm going to do is take our chicken out and I'm going to let that cool on a cutting board before we cut that into some pieces. Super important to remember we're going to be taking some of the soup. I like to transfer it to a blender. You can also do an immersion blender. I don't always like the consistency that the immersion blender does but I just wanted to note that you make sure that you do not add your chicken back to the pot before you've done the blending process because then you're gonna have to blend some chicken. We're going to take about three cups of our soup. Carefully transfer this to a blender and you want to make sure it is a hot safe type blender. Just blend this just until it's nice and creamy. There we go. We'll carefully transfer this back in so to prevent splattering you can kind of just stick something in there. Pour that over top. Use a rubber spatula just to get all of that out. So we will stir that together. Okay that is perfect. I want a good amount of texture in the soup and you could totally eat this like this without the chicken. So it's a great vegetarian option to just leave the chicken out but we're going to just cut this into some bite-sized chunks. You could shred it too. I don't really particularly like shredded chicken in a soup unless it was a chili. So I have the chicken in some rough chops and we're going to add that to our soup. I don't have my bench scraper but I'll do this. I have both dogs on either side and then we will mix that together and this is finished. So now we can taste a little bit of this. It is piping hot but and you can always season this with some cilantro if you like it. I have a lot of people in my family that do not like cilantro so you can do some chives but cilantro would probably be best. So good. I love the poblano in it. I love the smokiness from the fire roasted corn so it's a great option if you don't have fresh corn. It might be a little hard to find but you could always grill the corn. Drew you can try a spoonful here. He has to run to a dentist appointment so we uh don't have a lot of time. What do you think? He's in heaven. That's so good. Do you approve as a corn lover of this soup? I absolutely approve. Yeah. It's just the right amount of corn. I think the spice level is perfect too. You could even go a little bit more. You can't really taste the heat but it adds just like a background flavor. So do you think it needs any more salt? I hate more salt. A hair, like a hair more salt. I think you could serve this with some sourdough bread or a pizza. We, speaking of pizza, I've gotten a lot of requests about doing a pizza. Just know that that is coming. I've been trying to work on a recipe that is worth sharing and we haven't really got there yet. As always you guys can send me recipe requests in the comments below or you can email me them. Whatever works. I always appreciate them and I always take them into account. So thank you guys so much. So as always I'll catch you in the next recipe and I'll see you in the comments. Rosie is here expecting to get a bowl of this I think but you will not be getting any of this.