Jeff's Chicken Corn Soup for a Crowd

A long time ago, Jeff asked an old farmer's wife how to make chicken corn soup.  She looked at him as if he was daft, and then told him to cook chicken with corn - duh.  Jeff  has expanded on those basic ingredients and over the years learned to make pretty decent soup.  Last week, his own mother asked him for his chicken corn soup recipe, so I thought it may be time to write it down for everyone:

Jeff's Chicken Corn Soup

(makes 5 gallons)

Ingredients:

• 20 lbs chicken pieces (we use thighs and breasts)
• 4 lbs onions
• 1 bag celery
• 1/2 stick of butter (or 1/4 cup vegetable oil)
• 1 Tablespoon ground pepper
• 1/4 cup of salt
• 1/4 cup of chicken bouillon powder
• 3 gallon bags of frozen corn
• additional seasoning to taste

Using a 22 quart pressure cooker - with the drain tray for jars placed in the bottom - add the 20 lbs of meat and 1 gallon water (the drain plate prevents the meat from burning).  Cook the chicken at 10 pounds of pressure for 20 minutes.  This pretty much "destroys" the meat.

Pour meat through colander, catching the broth in a bowl.  Pour all the broth back into the pot.  Let the meat cool enough to handle, then debone it and add it back to the pot.

Coarsely chop the onions and celery and simmer in a separate large pot, with some butter or oil (just enough to get the onions started to make juice, about 1/4 cup or so).  Simmer for 20 minutes, until soft.  Optional:  we use our salsa screen for the food mill and run the onion/celery mixture through this, which removed all the strings from the celery, and leaves "no chunks".  The onion/celery mixture makes another gallon of creamy liquid, which we add to the broth.  For "chunky" soup, the food mill step can be skipped, just add the mixture to the broth.

Add pepper, salt and bouillon.  At this point, the pot will be less than half full.  Add the corn until the kernels are level with the liquid.  Bring back to a full boil.

We then let the soup sit several hours (actually over night).  By the next morning, the corn will have soaked up all the liquid.  Add more water to again just cover the corn.  Reheat the soup, adjust seasoning (with pepper, salt and bouillon powder) and simmer for several hours.  (We simmer it all day and serve it in the evening.)

This is the soup Jeff originally made for a wedding with over 100 guests, for which we had doubled the above recipe. 

 

We freeze left-overs in 1 gallon containers