My Gems of Parenting

It has been a LONG time since I have had this soup.  I hadn’t actually made this soup until now.  When I was making the chicken broth, my uncle commented on Facebook that when my grandmother was cooking chicken broth on the stove in the morning, he knew they were having Avgolemono Soup for dinner that night!  That was my motivation to finally make it.  The ingredient list is short, but it does require a little time and attention while making it.  The results are worth it, I promise!  If you want, you can add some cooked, shredded chicken to this to make it more of a meal.  I made it without.

Avgolemono Soup
Recipe from my Uncle Chris

What you need:

1 quart broth
1/4 cup long grain rice or orzo
1 egg
Juice of 1 lemon

How to make it:

Bring broth to boil. Add rice or orzo. Cover, reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, squeeze lemon and mix with egg in a bowl.

When rice is done cooking, remove from stove. Using a ladle, add a small amount of hot broth very slowly to the egg-lemon mix while constantly stirring the egg-lemon mix with a wisk or mixer. Continue doing this with about half the broth and then reverse the process; use your ladle to slowly add this mix back into the remaining broth. When this process is complete your soup should look frothy.

Return it to the stove to heat back up to serving temp–But don’t let it boil! What you are making is called a suspension. The soup looks creamy, but it is actually comprised of tiny globs of egg suspended in the broth. The cooling process used to create the suspension is called tempering. If you just dumped the egg into the hot broth it would cook too fast to suspend (you end up with egg-drop soup). You don’t ever want to boil the soup because that will cook the egg too much and cause it to separate from the broth. This happens also when you reheat the soup. It never looks as good as it does on the first serving.

Tags: chicken, Greek food, lemon