Martha Stewart's Easy Hack For Better Chicken Soup Is Pure Genius

For decades, lifestyle and cooking maven Martha Stewart has built her career solely on sharing her insights, tips, and methods for cultivating a beautiful home and cooking deliciously elegant meals. Her show "Martha Stewart Living" aired throughout the 1990s, bringing viewers practical advice for everything from incorporating her favorite kitchen design tips into your home to how to perfectly poach an egg. Today, she continues this tradition on social media, sharing short clips for simple, ingenious ways to improve beloved comfort recipes like chicken soup.

As it turns out, Stewart's method for building extra flavor into your soup's broth is as simple as it is unexpected — she treats it a bit like a stock. When building her broth, she adds her chicken to a soup pot with water and a bunch of chopped veggies so all the flavors can bloom and marry together. Though the expected carrots and onions certainly make an appearance, she also adds a chopped parsnip to the mix, just like her mother always did, as she explained in a video shared on Facebook.

Though this may seem like an unusual addition to traditional chicken soup, it's actually a pretty common thing. Parsnips not only bring a beautiful nutty, earthy sweetness to the dish, they also bring fiber and a bunch of vitamins of the alphabet, including C, K, and E. Parsnips are also a lighter alternative to carbs like potatoes and pasta, as they have a fibrous texture that makes the soup filling without feeling too heavy, leaving room for an accompanying toasted cheese.

If you want to build a fresh broth like Martha Stewart does, infused with deep vegetal, meaty flavors, you certainly can, but it's not necessary to create a delicious parsnip chicken soup. You can instead use bone broth or your favorite store-bought stock and saute your soup veggies along with the chicken in a separate pan. Use some of your stock or broth to deglaze the pan and pick up all that gorgeous brown fond and add it to the soup pot, which is a much faster way to build flavor.

As for the parsnips themselves, a quick saute caramelizes some of their natural sugars, bringing out their nutty sweetness, which will only deepen as the soup simmers. Be sure to cut them into larger cubes or rounds to ensure they cook slowly and become al dente when the soup is ready, rather than becoming mushy and falling apart. Of course, if you're not a huge fan of chunky soups, feel free to simmer until your veggies are super soft, blend with an immersion blender, and add sauteed chicken afterward. A dollop of heavy cream turns this soup into a velvety veggie bisque with a subtly earthy parsnip flavor.

If you find the parsnips impart a little too much sweetness, don't worry! A pinch of turmeric is a powerhouse ingredient that gives chicken soup a pop of bright flavor that will counteract the sweetness, and bring out the parsnips' subtler nuances.