ROSOL POLISH CHICKEN SOUP

Rosół Polish Chicken Soup is all the comfort! Healthy and budget friendly, requires no culinary expertise, and it involves only the most humble ingredients that makes wonderfully rich broth with multiple layers of flavor.

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This Rosół Chicken Soup recipe is an amped up version of my mother’s rosół soup with a host of nourishing ingredients like garlic and dry mushrooms. This chicken soup is delicious, nutritious and comforting in the best way possible. For all of those reasons, rosół or chicken soup is the most basic, most beloved, and most frequently cooked dish in many Polish households.

Jump to:

• What is Rosół Polish Chicken Soup?
• Why You’ll Love This Recipe
• Ingredients For Rosół Polish Chicken Soup
• Equipment You’ll Need
• How To Make Rosół
• Cook’s Tip For Storing:
• Tips For Making Rosół
• Substitutions and Variations
• FAQ
• Traditional Polish Recipes
• Did You Make This Recipe And Love It?
• Rosół Polish Chicken Soup

What is Rosół Polish Chicken Soup?

Rosół is a traditional Polish chicken soup. Usually is made with meat that is left on the bone, served with fine noodles and is garnished with fresh chopped parsley. The meat is cooked with a variety of root vegetables such as carrots, parsnip, leek, onion, and lightly seasoned with salt and pepper. Rosół equally praised as a starter served in traditional restaurants and also hearty and soothing home classic usually cooked and served on the weekends. This flavourful soup is thought by many to be a great immune boosting remedy and cooked when people are sick to warm the body and recover faster.

Why You’ll Love This Recipe

• This homemade chicken soup is delicious. The combination of spices and herbs makes it the best chicken broth you will ever taste.
• This delicious soup is made with a ton of vegetables that release all its goodness into the broth.
• This rosół soup is packed with nutrients, such as protein, vitamins and minerals.

Ingredients For Rosół Polish Chicken Soup

With just a few simple ingredients, you can have fragrant chicken soup. Here’s what you’ll need to make it:

• Chicken
• Yellow onion
• Carrots
• Celery roots
• Parsnip
• Dried portable mushrooms– They add some flavor and improve the color of the soup.
• Leek– Both white and green parts are fine, just make sure to clean it well as dirt tends to hide between the thick leaves.
• Savoy cabbage
• Garlic– Technically garlic is optional, use as much or as little as you’d like.
• Parsley leaves– Flat leaf parsley or curly parsley are both fine to use.
• Fresh lovage – This is an amazing herb that lends a great flavor and unexpected depth to the soup. I like fresh lovage because leaves a fresh tasting broth. You could also use 2 tablespoons of dried lovage leaves or if you can’t find fresh or dry lovage you can just omit it.
• Bay leave– Bay leaves lend a floral sweetness to the stock.
• Black Peppercorns
• Salt and pepper
• Noodles

Note: Scroll down to the recipe card section of the post for the ingredients with amounts included and for more complete directions.

Equipment You’ll Need

• Large pot
• Cutting board and knife
• Saucepan for cooking pasta and strainer

How To Make Rosół

Learning how to make rosół chicken soup is pretty easy. This simple soup takes just a few steps! Here’s how to make it:

• Wash the chicken thoroughly and place in a large soup pot. Fill the pot with COLD water, enough to cover the chicken. Bring to a gentle boil, and use a spoon to skim any foam that may form off the surface. Simmer the chicken uncovered for about 30 to 45 minutes before adding the remaining ingredients.
• While the chicken is simmering, peel the onion and roast directly on the open flame of the burner. If using an electric stove, slice the onion in half, place in a dry pan and heat until the onion burns on the surface. Clean and cut the vegetables into large pieces.
• Add veggies, spices and add more water, just enough for everything to be covered. At this point salt the soup with 2 teaspoon of kosher salt. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to lowest and cover partway, leaving just a little bit of an opening at the top. Simmer until the meat is tender and the chicken is falling off the bones, about 2 hours.
• When ready, carefully remove the chicken from the pot. Using your finger, take the chicken meat of the bones shredding or cutting into bite size pieces. Discard all bones.
• Strain the broth: Place the large colander on the empty pot and pour the broth into it. Pick out the carrots, parsnip, celery root from colander, slice them more or less elegantly and place them back to the strained broth. Taste the soup and see if it needs more salt.
• Cook noodles separately, according to package instructions. Once cooked rinse with cold water to remove starch.
• When ready to serve, put the cooked noodles into the soup bowls, shredded chicken, vegetables and ladle the hot broth on top. Season the soup with ground black pepper to taste and garnish with a sprinkling of chopped fresh parsley. SMACZNEGO!

Cook’s Tip For Storing:

• Leftover Rosół – Make sure the soup is completely cooled before you store it, and separate any leftover soup from the veggies and meat. Stored in a tight-lid glass container for up to 4 days in the refrigerator. Cold soup will turn into jelly, this is how it supposed to be, when you warm it up it will be liquid again.
• You can freeze the excess broth for a later use. Use the leftover meat as a filling for other dishes.
• You can store any extra noodles in the fridge for a day or two in a covered container. 

Tips For Making Rosół

Here are a few basic tips to help make your rosół the best it can be:

• Use the best quality chicken you can.
• Use COLD water for this soup. When you add cold water, all the flavor from the meat goes to the water. When browning the chicken or using hot water, the flavor stays in the meat.
• Burn the onion on a hot dry frying pan before adding it to the water, this ensures deep golden color and enhances flavor.
• Do not allow the soup to boil too rapidly. Bring it up to a low boil, then quickly bring it down to a simmer. Extensive boiling will cause the fat to emulsify and leave your rosół dingy with a greasy mouthfeel.
• Don’t cut the vegetables small: Leave them big pieces or else they will start disintegrating resulting in a cloudy bone broth.
• Go easy on salt; You can always add more at the end.
• Skimming of every bit of foam that removes the impurities and gives you a beautiful clear broth.
• Soup noodles have to be cooked separately and should not be mixed with the rest of the soup. This keeps them noodle-like, they won’t swell up from sitting in the soup overnight or make the broth cloudy.

Substitutions and Variations

With chicken soup, the possibilities for variations are endless. My rosół soup is the way I have always been making it but feel free to alter it according to your own taste and ingredients you have on hand.

• If you don’t have celery root, use a couple stalks of celery instead.
• Dried or fresh lovage is completely optional and can be skipped.
• Add more vegetables! I love the idea of using up what vegetables I have on hand in a soup like this. You can add zucchini and springs fresh dill.
• Instead of egg noodles, you can also make rosół with cooked white rice.

FAQ

What to do with leftover rosół soup?

The leftover rosół broth can be used as a base for the soups. I like to freeze it in ice cube trays and add to sauces or stir fry.

The meat can be used for chicken salad, chicken sandwiches or filling for meat pierogi.

Can I use boneless chicken to make rosół soup?

Yes you can, but I highly recommend using chicken on the bone to get the best flavor.

What is lovage?

Lovage is an herb that was once very popular and featured in nineteenth-century cookbooks, but has gone out of fashion. Its leaves look a bit like parsley leaves. It is sweetish, bearing a distant resemblance to fennel. You can find fresh lovage at farmers markets in spring and summer. Dry lovage you can get it online or at a Polish or Eastern European deli.

Traditional Polish Recipes

If you love traditional Polish recipes you should also check:

• Potato and Cheese Pierogi (Pierogi Ruskie)
• Beet Greens Soup – Polish Botwinka 
• Mushroom Soup
• Yellow Wax Beans With Breadcrumbs
• Cream Puffs
• Kolachkes

And, if you’re looking for more chicken recipes, I’d suggest you checking this out: Coconut Chicken

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The nutritional and calories information shown is an estimated provided by an online nutrition calculator. It does not assert or suggest that readers should or should not count calories, and should not be considered a substitute for a professional nutritionist’s or doctor’s counselling.