Demystifying the Chicken Noodle Soup Cubes

How my husband almost convinced me to start writing recipes.

• Please note: This post contains affiliate links.

I’ve shared these Chicken Noodle Soup Starter Cubes on social media a few times, and they always seem to confuse people.

“Wait, are the veggies raw?”

“How do you turn this into a meal?”

“Won’t the chicken get overcooked?”

So, I’m here to answer all the questions and explain HOW I came to prep chicken noodle soup this way.

My husband LOVES Chicken Noodle Soup. It was one of the first things I learned about him. He would buy a family-sized Chicken Noodle Soup from WAWA at least once a week. So when he finally moved to Grand Rapids, I was excited to try making the perfect chicken noodle soup. I’d ask him if it was good each time I made it. And he would look at me like,

“Yes, it’s soup, it’s delicious.”

“Well, is it better than last time?” I’d ask.

“What did you do differently?” He’d reply.

When I said I wasn’t sure, I just put a little of this or that; he’d remind me that I needed to start keeping track of these things so that I’d actually have a repeatable recipe to make adjustments to. I mostly rolled my eyes since I wasn’t the kind of person who followed recipes, but the more I cooked for people, the more they would ask me for a recipe. He even bought me a pack of index cards so I could start writing things down. But that wasn’t my process, it was easier for me to film myself while cooking to keep track of what I did. I’d go back and watch my videos to remind myself of how I made a dish,

“What did I add?”

“When did I put that in?”

Slowly, I started writing recipes. Looking back, Chicken Noodle Soup is the first recipe I nailed down. And I’ve been writing them ever since.

The Hart’s Perfect Chicken Noodle Soup

• 1 tbsp olive oil

• 2 cups diced yellow onion

• 1 cup diced carrots

• 1 cup diced celery

• 3 cloves minced garlic

• 1 cup dry white wine

• 4 cups chicken stock (homemade is best, but if you don’t have it, I prefer Better than Bouillon over boxed stock)

• 2 cups cooked chicken (I like it diced, but if you prefer shredded, that’s fine too)

• 1/2 cup orzo pasta

• A handful of fresh dill (I use dried when I don’t have fresh, but for dried, use 2 teaspoons)

• The juice of a whole lemon

• Salt and Pepper to taste

• A splash of heavy cream for serving (optional)

This recipe makes about 4-6 servings if you're making the soup fresh.

Add olive oil and onions to a medium saucepan over medium heat. Once the onions get translucent, add celery and carrots. Sauté the veggies together for a few minutes before adding the garlic. Stir that for a minute more (just until you can smell it), and then add the cup of white wine. Let the wine cook off the alcohol for a few minutes before adding the 4 cups of chicken stock. Bring the soup up to a boil and then turn it down to a simmer until the veggies are tender. Taste for seasoning and add salt and fresh cracked pepper to taste. Then add your cooked chicken and 1/2 cup of dry orzo pasta and cook until the pasta is done. Take off the heat and add in the fresh dill and lemon juice. I like to add a splash of heavy cream and extra black pepper to mine, but my husband likes it as is.

A note about Orzo: You can obviously use whatever noodles you like, but when working on this recipe, we decided Orzo is the superior noodle for chicken noodle soup. The larger the noodle, the more likely it is to fall off the spoon. Orzo allows you to get a spoon full of noodles and soup every time.

Making a whole pot of the soup is delicious, and yes, you get more flavor from sautéing the onions and vegetables. But I’ve found that making it from a frozen starter cube isn’t lacking in flavor, and it makes it easy to make soup from scratch on a weeknight.

I used to portion half of the soup into Souper Cubes trays right before I added noodles and then cook the noodles when I reheated the soup. This works great! But I also have a tiny freezer, so prepping the ingredients and freezing them before cooking, only adding the extra stock when I need to cook it, really saves on freezer space.

This method can be applied to your favorite Chicken Noodle Soup recipe—it doesn’t need to be mine.

Someone suggested I add Better Than Bouillon right to the frozen cubes so that I can just add water when I go to cook it. I haven't cooked this batch yet (it's still in my freezer) but I'll let you know.

To make the cubes, you’re splitting this recipe between two 2-cup molds. So each cube gets 1 cup of onions, 1/2 cup of carrots, 1/2 cup of celery, 1-2 cloves of garlic, and 1 cup of cooked chicken on top. Then, enough chicken stock is added to fill the rest of the tray so that everything holds together when freezing.

When you go to cook the soup, it doesn’t matter if you’re making one cube or both; you add 2 cups of chicken stock (per cube). You can also add a splash of white wine with the stock, but I often don’t when cooking from frozen. The purpose of the white wine in the original recipe is to deglaze the pan and extract any caramelized bits of flavor from the onions and veggies.

Bring the frozen cube and stock to a boil and then turn it down to a simmer. Wait until the veggies are mostly cooked (you’re mainly checking carrots here). Taste for seasoning and add salt and fresh cracked pepper to taste. Add 1/2 cup of dry orzo pasta and cook until the pasta is done. Add some fresh dill and freshly squeezed lemon juice if you have it, and serve.

One 2-cup cube with 2 cups of stock added will make approx 2-3 big bowls of soup.