Thursday, January 10, 2013

Cheddar Chicken Chowder

Soup season continues, this time with a hearty, thick, decidedly UNpaleo offering that I shamelessly ripped off of Cooking Light and modified to be healthier.  Cooking Light's schtick is to "lighten" up recipes to make them lower calorie and lower fat.  Often, this means that they use low-fat products which, as we all know, as just horrid conduits of synthetic or processed sugars (among other issues); so, while you're calorie count goes down, your glycogen process goes all to heck.  Now, let me clear up something about this soup: There are corn and potatoes in the recipe, which doesn't do your glucose levels any favors.  Unless your body is accustomed to starches and carbohydrates it's quite possible you may experience an insulin spike and resulting crash with this soup.  For anyone who is fully dedicated to eating Atkins, paleo, or South Beach this is a soup to avoid.  For those who embrace the clean eating and everything-in-moderation position this is an awesome addition to the soup season repertoire.  Whenever I have guests in the winter this is one of my favorite things to prepare and serve with a warm, crusty bread.  It would even serve beautifully in bread bowls if you have that option.

All that said, I didn't take pictures of the preparation of this soup, so all my pictures are acquisitions off the internets, including the final picture of the soup output.  That's just the way the Adventure Cooker rolls, sometimes.

Cheddar Chicken Chowder

5 c. chicken broth
2-3 lbs chicken breast or chicken tenderloins, cut into bite-sized pieces
4-6 slices thick cut bacon, chopped
10 oz frozen corn (or similar size - whatever your grocery store has)
4-5 small-to-medium red potatoes, unpeeled and chopped 
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, pressed/smashed/diced/what-have-you
12 oz can coconut milk (or 2 c. whole milk or heavy cream)
8-12 oz sharp or extra sharp cheddar cheese, shredded
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
Arrowroot or cornstarch to thicken

In a large soup pot on high heat, brown the bacon pieces.  Remove the bacon pieces and leave the rendered grease in the soup pot.  The bacon bits will be used as a soup topping later (unless your spouse finds them first and eats them all).  Add the chicken to the bacon drippings and brown the chicken for 5 minutes or so.  Add bell pepper, onion, garlic, salt, and pepper.  When things get aromatic, add the chicken broth and potatoes.  Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer for 45-60 minutes.  When the potatoes are thoroughly cooked, increase the heat, add the frozen corn and bring back to a boil.  Add the coconut milk (or cream) and, with the soup at a good boil, thicken with your chosen starch.  Reduce the heat and stir in the shredded cheese, one handful at a time until it's thoroughly blended.  

Serve topped with bacon bits (if there are any left), a little more shredded cheese, and green onion.  Roasted green chile goes with this amazingly, too! 

This soup reheats well, but doesn't freeze nicely.  


To avoid falling into process armageddon, I've found that doing all the chopping up front makes putting this soup together a lot easier.  Be mindful of cross contamination issues, since you'll be horsing around with raw chicken.  What I do is chop all my veggies first: Onion, pepper, garlic, and potatoes.  But, Adventure Cooker, won't the potatoes go black as they oxidize? Oh yeah.  Well, if everything is prepped with sufficient alacrity, AND if you toss a damp paper towel over your chopped produce you'll slow that process down some.  If you're really worried about the potatoes going black chop them up and submerge them in a bowl of cold water until you're ready to use them.



Next, chop your meats up. To prevent cross contamination problems with the raw chicken, chop your bacon first, and make the last thing you do on your cutting board the chicken.  To even further avoid cross contamination problems, use a completely separate cutting board for the chicken, but for those of us who cherish minimal clean up and are good at thoroughly disinfecting our cutting boards, this process works, too.  So, bacon first.
Chicken second.  

Any cut of chicken will work in this recipe, really, but if speed is of the essence, I found that using chicken tenderloins was easiest because it was only one chopping exercise, instead of using thighs or breasts where you'd have to slice it up and then chop the slices.  And, really, who needs all that noise?

Brown the bacon up, being sure to leave the bacon grease/rendering in the soup pot.


After you've removed the bacon pieces, add the chicken and brown that up.


It's painfully obvious that I stole all these pictures and I'm feeling vaguely ashamed about that right now.  Well, not really, but still.  Onward.

Add the bell pepper, onion, and garlic and stir up until the delicious smells of bacon-seared chicken and veggies starts to waft out of the soup pot.  Dump in the chicken broth.  This is where you can take advantage of your previous soup efforts wherein you also socked away chicken broth in the freezer!



Add your potatoes to everything, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, cover, and leave it alone for 45-60 minutes, or however long it takes for the potatoes to be thoroughly cooked.  Bring the soup up to a rolling boil and add your corn niblets.  It's important to use frozen corn here because it is still basically raw and crisp.  Canned corn has had the ever-lovin' life cooked out of it already so to add it to a soup would be the equivalent of running over a dead cat: it only gets deader.

Corn is one of those things that is best bough organic, since it is one of the chiefly GMOed products on the market currently.  That said, only do what your budget can handle.  Go ahead and drop in the coconut milk or dairy cream, depending on what your preference is.  I use coconut milk because it's something I almost always have in the pantry (see inadvertent plug for buying things on Amazon there?).



 The corn and milk will drop the soup's temperature, so bring the soup up to a boil again so it can be thickened.  As a dominantly paleo eater, I use arrowroot powder to thicken things, but the tricky thing about arrowroot is that heat breaks it down, so you can't endlessly keep your soup simmering with an arrowroot thickener because eventually it will thin again.  But, for this soup, arrowroot works just grand.


Tapioca starch, non-gmo corn starch, or even unbleached white flour would also work as optional thickeners.  If you're going to go the flour route, mix it into the coconut milk or cream, and then slowly whisk the cream into the soup.  Once the soup is thickened, reduce the temperature a little to avoid scorching or sticking and start to add your shredded cheese, one handful at a time.

The cheese should smoothly blend into the soup changing the color of it from a creamier white to a pale orange/yellow.  Delicious.  Served up, it should look something like this:


It tastes so good.  The heartiness of the thick soup with the chicken and potatoes contrasted with the sweet snap of corn and the saltiness of bacon and cheese.  The gift of the senses is something to be thankful for with this soup.  Enjoy!

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