Greek avgolemono soup is a magically cream-less creamy chicken soup, thickened with eggs and made tangy with a generous amount of lemon juice. As it usually contains only a few ingredients, it’s a natural dish to adapt to the 5:30 Challenge.
No matter their origin, the best, most chicken-y chicken soups use homemade broth, which is hard to make from scratch in a 30-minute meal. However, it is possible to approximate a homemade broth using rotisserie chicken, which is heavily seasoned and easy to break up into parts. Rapidly simmering the legs, wings and back of the chicken with just enough water to cover can get you a flavorful broth in about 10 minutes. This leaves plenty of time to shred the breast meat and prep the remaining soup ingredients: eggs, lemon and rice.
To incorporate the eggs into the hot broth, you’ll want to temper them by slowly whisking some of the hot liquid into the beaten eggs before pouring the eggs into the pot. This step ensures that the eggs thicken the broth to a luxuriously creamy texture instead of turning to bits of scrambled egg. I add the bulk of the lemon juice with the eggs; the remainder is added to taste when serving.
You’ll find recipes for avgolemono soup that incorporate either white rice or orzo pasta to bulk up the dish; I prefer to use either microwaveable or leftover rice, which only needs a minute or so in the hot broth to heat through. The final flourish is a handful of green herbs (I prefer dill) for a fresh finish.
Avgolemono Soup
2 lemons
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