Smoked Chicken Rice Soup – A slow cooker smoked chicken soup full of yummy vegetables and wild rice.
As much as we love our double noodle soup, smoked chicken rice soup is a nice change from the old fashioned and traditional chicken soup.
This is the kind of soup I love to prepare when I come across this unusual piece of meat.
Prepared With Natural Hardwood Smoked Chicken!
Smoked chicken is not something I see everyday looking through the meat case at any of my local supermarkets.
You are more like to find smoked pork ribs which are perfection with sauerkraut for a Pennsylvania Dutch style dinner. But chicken? Sure.
Smoked Chicken Rice Soup
In fact, none of my neighborhood supermarkets regularly carry packaged smoked chicken.
Smoked turkey pieces (such as necks) and ham hocks are easy to find. These are perfect for seasoning greens. But when you find whole chicken pieces (or turkey drumsticks), that’s when you grab them and make soup! Psst.. I found mine at Food Lion®
The Pinterest® image below details the process for making the soup base.
I must confess that I rarely prepare a crock pot or slow cooker recipe by “dumping” all the ingredients in the pot prior to setting to a LOW or HIGH cook setting.
It is ideal for this first step in this slow cooker chicken rice soup recipe – extracting the flavor from the smoked meat.
Even if the entire cooking process is in the crock pot, I am likely to brown or sear meats and poultry prior to “slow cooking”.
The Chicken Pieces Are Fully Cooked
The smoked chicken pieces are fully cooked and ready to eat once re-heated but in preparing the soup, I am more interested in extracting all the flavor from the meat and breaking it down into bits of meat that will easily fit on a soup spoon.
Because the smoked meat is already salty, I do not add any seasonings to the first step in the soup recipe – creating the fork tender, “pulled chicken” meat pieces for the soup.
Smoked Chicken Noodle Soup?
And why not? Adding the rice was a special request from the DH. He ate two huge bowls of soup for dinner.
But… I am positive this soup would be equally tasty with pasta instead of rice. My favorite soup pasta include Fideo, Ditalini, Pastina and of course orzo!
Love smoky flavor in soups? Here is another yummy soup that works well with smoked meat – smoked sausage.
Consider preparing a variation using smoked chicken sausage!
[tasty-recipe id=”14334″]
Why Not Smoke A Duck Or Whole Chicken For Dinner?
For soup or sandwiches, smoked meat makes a delicious soup ingredient or sandwich filling.
Smoking a chicken or even a beef brisket is easy in a smoker or regular grill set on a very low temperature. Food grade butcher paper is ideal for this purpose.