Easy Chicken Tortilla Soup Recipe

Tortilla soup is one of my all-time favorite soups to make with leftover roast chicken. I love soups that can be individually customized through toppings and Tortilla Soup is a great example of that. Add cabbage, avocado, hot peppers, lime wedges, fried tortilla strips at the table. One can make this soup gluten-free by omitting the tortilla strips in their bowl or make their bowl extra spicy by loading up on the chili slices. If you have kids at home, letting them add their own toppings gives them an opportunity to make decisions at the table and modify their bowl to their own liking.

I make a lot of Mexican food at home and usually have all the ingredients on hand to throw this together: a can of beans, some frozen corn, hot peppers, tomato, cilantro, avocado, tortillas. After making a roast chicken for a different meal, I remove all the meat from the bones and set it aside, and I put the carcass into a Crockpot overnight or Instapot for 4 hours with onion, celery, and carrot to make an easy home-made broth. The meat and broth from this left over chicken will be used in this tortilla soup recipe.

How To Make Tortilla Soup

To make this tortilla soup, start with a sofrito of onions, peppers, and tomato. A sofrito is a paste of sautéed, caramelized onions, peppers, and tomato. This is the flavor base of many Spanish, Caribbean, and Latin American dishes. Making a sofrito takes awhile. It makes up the bulk of the cooking time for this soup.

Once the sofrito is made, add the broth and bring it to a boil. While you are doing that, you can slice and chop all the toppings for your table. Once you are at a boil, add the remaining soup ingredients. Whenever you use leftover cooked chicken for a soup, add it at the very end and heat it gently to avoid that cardboard-y twice-cooked chicken flavor that you can get sometimes….you know what I’m talking about.

If you don’t have leftover chicken and broth to use, you can make this from fresh bone in chicken (whole or pieces). It just takes a bit longer. Simply put the fresh chicken in a pot with onions, celery, carrot, herbs, and garlic and simmer for a couple of hours or until the chicken comes off the bone easily. Remove the chicken and pick the meat off. When you have made the sofrito, set a strainer over that pot and pour the chicken broth in. Follow the remaining steps of the recipe.

#homecooksguide on Instagram with your Tortilla Soup creations and let me know how your soup came out in the comment section.

Easy Chicken Tortilla Soup Recipe

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• Author: Kara Taylor- Home Cooks Guide
• Prep Time: 10 minutes
• Cook Time: 45 minutes
• Total Time: 45 minutes
• Yield: 8 servings 1x
• Category: Soup
• Method: Boil
• Cuisine: Mexican
• Diet: Low Lactose

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Description

This delicious Mexican Soup is gluten-free and dairy-free.  Customize it to taste at the table with fun, fresh toppings.  Using leftovers from a roast chicken, this soup is easy to pull together on a busy weeknight.

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Ingredients

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For the Soup

8 cups chicken broth (preferably home-made and unsalted)

2 T oil

1/2 large onion, diced

2 lg bell peppers (any color, I used orange), diced

1 lg tomato, diced

1/2 T – 1 T ground cumin

1 T lime juice

1 T salt (if using unsalted broth, less if using seasoned or store bought broth)

1 can black beans, rinsed and drained

1 cup corn

1 cup frozen or fresh corn kernals

2–4 cups cooked chicken.

For the Toppings

Any combination of: tortilla chips, fried tortilla strips, cilantro, avocado, cabbage, radish, hot peppers, lime wedges, creme fraiche, sour creme, queso fresco or cotija, minced raw onion, fried garlic or onion.

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Instructions

Heat the oil in a 4 qt pot.  Add the onions and peppers and sauté until fragrant and tender.  Then add the tomato and cumin and continue to sauté on low, stirring occasionally for a long time.  Until it almost forms a paste.  This is a sofrito, the flavor base to many Spanish/Latin dishes.

Add the broth and bring to a boil.  Add all other ingredients except the corn and chicken.  Bring back to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes.

Add the corn and bring back to a boil.  Add the chicken and immediately turn the heat off.

While the soup cooks, prepare all the toppings.

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Equipment

| Stainless Steel Measuring Cups, 5 Piece Stackable Measuring Set |

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| Lodge Pre-Seasoned Cast Iron Double Dutch Oven With Loop Handles, 5 qt |

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Notes

$2/portion