It took about 2.5 hours total with an additional hour of shopping for ingredients. And the great part about this basic soup was that I did it all from scratch—learning to make the chicken stock from the bird up. The majority of the cooking time (90 minutes) was making the stock. I got the stock and soup recipes from Cook’s Illustrated’s The New Best Recipe. I highly recommend this cookbook as the editors take the time to try out the best recipes for any given dish and deliver what they believe to be the best recipe along with some supporting rationale and insight into what “makes” that dish.

I made chicken noodle soup.