Any good recipes for leftover turkey soup? We havent made soup before, so specifics should help.

It all starts with stock. Take your bones, and the liver, neck etc if you still have them and put 'em in the biggest pot you have. Add a halved onion, two to three carrots and celery sticks (cut into 1-2 inch chunks) and a bunch of sage, rosemary and thyme. Fill the pot w/ water, add a touch of salt and pepper and simmer for a few hours.

I use allrecipes.com a lot. You can go there and search for Turkey Soup. You'll get a lot of hits, but they all start w/ turkey stock.

Jim is on target. My next step is to assemble five or more vegies (plus diced tomato, onion and, garlic seem to go in most soups I make). Add the longest cooking first and she quickest cooking last. Pick a starch: pasta, potato or, rice. If you have cook bird left over of coarse add it. My preference would be Italian seasoning for flavor. Fresh herbs are great. In place of salt, I use soup base and often add two different ones.

I do not get more complicated than that. The soup is based on what is available.

I use Michael Ruhlmann's method (which is based on classic cooking techniques)

http://blog.ruhlman.com/ruhlmancom/2007/11/thanksgiving-th.html

Ok.
After the carcass renders, fish out the bones and leave the little bits of flotsam that fall off in there?

I made this recipe for Barbecue Chicken Soup with my leftover smoked turkey and homemade stock last year. Dang good stuff, in my opinion.

quote:

Originally posted by Chris in Cameron Park:
Ok.
After the carcass renders, fish out the bones and leave the little bits of flotsam that fall off in there?

You could, I like to double strain myself.

Once the pot has cooled enough (still quite warm to hot, just less hot than boiling and less painful when splashing on your skin) I fish out the large chunks, then I pour the stock through a colander that I use for draining pasta.

Remove the colander put it over another container to capture the drips, set aside.

Rinse out the bits on the bottom and lining the sides of the first pot.

Defat the stock using a gravy separator. You need to let the stock settle between pours to do a good job of defatting.

From the gravy separator, I pour through a fine mesh strainer back into the first pot. This is adequate for me, heard of others taking another step and running through a paper coffee filter.

I allow some fat into the stock but not more than a couple of T.

Now grab a cutting board or bowl and another bow, dig through all the bones, fat, skin etc, put what you want to keep in one bow and what you don't want to keep in the other.

*I don't add veggies to the first boil, I add them to the second. If I did add them to the first I would likely discard them.

Dump in the meat you pulled out and you're ready to go. Add the drippings from below the colander.

This meat is tasty, tender ... but it can be a lot of work ... I go through all the guck quickly, a first pass to identify the solid meaty chunks and try to focus on those ... you could spend hours getting every little strand of meat out, don't kill yourself, get some out but toss the rest.

From there what kind of soup do you want? Barley? Rice? Noodles? Vegetable soup?

This the style of separator I have. Acrylic, inexpensive:



Aside from being a PITA to clean they are a gadget worth buying if you don't have one.

Tip about the acrylic ones: put hot tap water in it for a minute or two, dump just prior to dumping the hot stuff in it.

If you don't have one you can use a large shallow metal spoon to skim off the worst of the fat.

You can chill it and scrape the hard fat off the top, but this doesn't work well for me. It takes too long to chill it down then heat it back up again and I'm ready to get the soup made at that point.

Mine this year was lots of smoked and roasted turkey, some leftover stuffing, rice, roasted Hatch chilies, and roasted white corn (from the cob--it's back in season here), plus a little ground chipotle.

This is the recipe that my wife uses, I'm not sure if it is hers or if she got it somewhere else, but it is hands down the best that I have ever had.

1 tablespoon butter
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped celery
4 (14.5 ounce) cans of chicken broth
1 (14.5 ounce) can vegetable broth
1/2 lb chopped cooked chicken or turkey
1 1/2 cups egg noodles
1 cup sliced carrots
1/2 teaspoon dried basil
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
salt and pepper to taste

n a large pot over medium heat, melt butter. Cook onion and celery in butter until just tender, 5 minutes. Pour in chicken and vegetable broths and stir in chicken or turkey, noodles, carrots, basil, oregano, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer 20 minutes before serving.

Just posted a stock recipe down below yesterday. Well worth the effort made for an excellent soup. You can pretty much use it as the stock in any turkey soup recipe.

I skimmed the fat and flotsam as things cooked. I used large slotted ladle to remove most of the solids when the stock was done. Then poured/ladled through a fine sieve. You can then pour into one of those fat separators mentioned above. Thing is with about 10 quarts it's easier to just let the pot set in the refrigerator to cool down and let the fats solidify and skim off the top later. Otherwise make multiple loads into the separator and then into another container, etc.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: r benash,

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Shawn W:
This the style of separator I have. Acrylic, inexpensive:



Aside from being a PITA to clean they are a gadget worth buying if you don't have one.

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KitchenAid makes a very nice separator that isn't a pain to clean, and has much more capacity than the little ones. I still have the smaller model pictured above, but never use it anymore. You can just google KitchenAid fat separator

So, I kinda followed JimK and SteveP's advice and simmered the carcass for 4hrs, fished out pieces, filtered through dish towel and put in refer overnight.
I checked today expecting to skim a layer of fat off the top, but what I found was the whole thing was a gelatinous mass. A big pot of jelly.
Is this right? I thought there would be broth too.

Yes. The jelly is the stock. It will melt when heated. The fat is the congealed, thickish, yellowish stuff on top of the jelled stock.

quote:

Originally posted by K Kruger:
Yes. The jelly is the stock. It will melt when heated. The fat is the congealed, thickish, yellowish stuff on top of the jelled stock.

Ok.
So, can I just add turkey, veggies, spice, cook for awhile and I got a soup?

quote:

Originally posted by Chris in Cameron Park:

quote:

Originally posted by K Kruger:
Yes. The jelly is the stock. It will melt when heated. The fat is the congealed, thickish, yellowish stuff on top of the jelled stock.

Ok.
So, can I just add turkey, veggies, spice, cook for awhile and I got a soup?

Ya, pretty much. Simmer veggies not more than a couple hours in total to avoid them becoming too soft.

Pot Barley: needs about an hour, simmer veggies 1 hour add barley, cook another hour, done

Rice: use 'Uncle Bens' I think they call it converted or something ... anyway it only needs about 25 minutes, throw the rice in for the last 25 minutes

Wild rice: needs about an hour total ... not a bad idea to cook for the first half hour in it's own pot, drain, add to soup for another 30 minutes ... this will help moderate the wild rice flavor

Pasta: only needs about 5 - 15 minutes, can be thrown in but I prefer to cook it seperate, drainse rinse chill, throw in the noodles you want and reheat just before serving (so the noodles don't get tto soft, gummy, or flour up the water.

quote:

Originally posted by K Kruger:
some leftover stuffing,

K, Soup looks great, and I like that part.

I make turkey gumbo on Friday. It's becoming more of a tradition than the Thursday food.

wow this thread is killing me! can't wait for my bird to come off the WSM.... I usually don't make stock from the smoked birds, but now I must try some of these tips. The pics looks awesome in the one post.

I have used some smoked chicken stock cooked down to even stronger reduction in No. 5 sauce and for a "beans and rice" w/ sausage jumble.

On the soups, I pretty much follow like the others, but everything I throw in first round, I usually just strain and toss. By the time I get to that point, I am usually to worn out to deal with separating, I toss to simplify. Usually freeze some or all of the stock, add whatever veggies and leftover meat I want later. Often as a matter of time, I may cook the stock overnight, refrigerate, then defat and strain the following day.