AT A GLANCE
PRESSURE-COOKER CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP
Old-fashioned, deeply flavorful chicken soup starts with a whole chicken and spends hours simmering on the stovetop. We were after the same deep flavor this soup delivers, but in a fraction of the time. We decided to turn the pressure cooker into a one-pot stop: Everything would go in with as little prep as possible—from a whole chicken to the uncooked noodles—to build flavor and make this soup among our easiest and tastiest ever.
1. Build an aromatic base: Since we’re making this soup from little more than a chicken and some water, it’s important to build a base of flavor with aromatics such as onion, garlic, and thyme. Softening the aromatics in the oil blooms and develops their flavors, making them more easily absorbed by the soup’s other elements.
2. Add a whole chicken: Using a whole chicken makes the best-tasting broth, thanks to all the flavor provided by the bones, skin, white meat, and dark meat. Since it’s much easier to break down a cooked chicken (the pieces practically fall apart at the joints, and the meat shreds easily) than it is to butcher a raw chicken, we simply threw the whole chicken into the pot. Before adding the chicken to the pot, check the cavity and remove the giblet package if necessary.
3. Cook on high pressure for 20 minutes: It would take hours to extract all the flavor from the chicken and turn the water into a deeply flavored broth if simply simmered in a regular pot on top of the stove. The pressure cooker, however, does this in a mere 20 minutes under high pressure. Once the chicken is cooked, you can remove it from the pot and shred the meat, discarding the skin and bones. Be warned, however, that the chicken will be fall-apart tender, and you may need to check the broth for any pieces you might have missed.
4. Cook the noodles in the soup: Rather than dirty another pot and wait for water to come to a boil to cook the noodles, we simply returned the soup to a vigorous simmer and cooked the noodles in the chicken broth while we shredded the chicken. The noodles picked up additional flavor from the broth and were fully tender by the time we were ready to add the shredded chicken to the finished soup.