Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup

 adapted from Modernist Cuisine at Home by Nathan Myhrvold

We recently got a pressure cooker and have been finding every excuse to use it.  I was pretty skeptical before we owned one, but they really are amazing.  Our model is an electric model made by InstantPot.  At first we were worried about finding a place to put it, since our kitchen is pretty small, but it turns out that having it away from the stove is great because it frees up a burner on the stove.  This recipe uses the pressure cooker in a few ways and all but one of them are awesome!

Ingredients

• 1/2 gallon chicken stock, preferably homemade (in a pressure cooker, if you have one!)
• 2 precooked chicken breasts, chopped
• 7 or 8 medium carrots, ends removed, then steamed and chopped
• 4 small leeks, white parts only, sliced almost in half and rinsed to remove grit, then steamed and chopped
• 4 ounces cooked fingerling potatoes, cooked
• 1/2 recipe fresh pasta (50:50 all purpose and semolina flours) cut into the shape of your choice, or about 8 to 12 ounces of dried noodles.

A few months ago we rented Nathan Myhrvold's book Modernist Cuisine at Home from the library.  The recipes range from simple to ultra-complicated, but most of them use some kind of non-standard technique or strange gadget to achieve a unique result.  A lot of recipes use a pressure cooker, which is a big reason that we chose to buy ours.

Chickeny Ingredients

The modernist cuisine recipe for chicken stock is great because it creates a full-flavored stock in only 1.5 hours of cooking time.  When I've made stock in the past it simmered on the stove for 4 to 7 hours, so this was a big improvement! The chicken breasts in this recipe are from a grocery store rotisserie chicken.  I don't really understand it, but they are usually cheaper than raw chickens, so we buy them now and then and use the carcass to make stock.

Noodles

Emily's dad gave us a pasta roller for christmas a couple of years ago and believe it or not, we actually use it semi-frequently.  The texture of the noodles is superior to store-bought pasta, and, perhaps equally important in my book: you can make noodles as thick as you want!  We created pretty thick noodles for this soup so that they would have a very chewy texture.  You can make the dough in a food processor, which only takes about 1 minute.  The dough needs to rest for 30 to 60 minutes, and then rolling and cutting it takes about 5 minutes.  So, as long as you aren't in a time crunch, it really doesn't take that much extra "active" time to make homemade pasta.  We are surprised by how easy it is just about every time we made homemade pasta.

Vegetables

We cooked our potatoes by poaching them in a mixture of chicken fat and bacon fat that we had leftover from other recipes.  Our potatoes were quite small - about the size of kalamata olives - so we didn't even need to chop them.  The potatoes are in a jar because we did the poaching inside the pressure cooker, according to a recipe from Modernist Cuisine.  The cooking technique is kind of like using a water bath - the hot steam in the pressure cooker heats the canning jar and the oil is supposed to flavor the potatoes.  I don't think they really ended up with that much extra flavor -  Boiled potatoes would probably be indistinguishable and a lot less work.  The carrots and leeks were steamed for 5 minutes in the pressure cooker, then removed and chopped into bite-size niblets.

Assembly

The stock was brought to a boil on the stove, then the chicken, peas, and noodles were added.  Fresh pasta cooks a lot faster, and ours were done in about 5 minutes.  The hot potatoes, carrots, and leeks were added and it was dinner time.  We got excited to take a picture, but our new camera was out of batteries!  We snapped a couple of photos on our phones, which basically get the point across.  :-)

Joe