It is getting very autumnal in the UK, with temperatures only reaching about 14° degrees Celsius maximum. What better time to make a nice hot chicken soup. That is if I would eat chicken.
There are a number of vegetarian "meat" available on the market, but every time I am tempted to buy these particular "meats", I read the ingredients and am being put off it immediately. I do buy them sometimes, they are good to have in the freezer especially when I am short on time or just don't feel well enough to cook.
But for this recipe, I decided to use jackfruit. It has become rather the go-to for fake meat, especially as a pretender to pulled pork or in chillies. I have done a braised jackfruit chilli myself and it was very popular with the man. The chilli didn't last two days. The recipe will be up soon.
Jackfruit is a rather large fruit, found in parts of Asia and belongs to the same family as figs and mulberries. In the UK you can mostly find it tinned in water. I usually buy them from Amazon in a bundle of 6 400 gr cans from Biona. They are organic and they always seem to taste nice after cooking. I never tried them raw. They are not cheap, they are usually around 18 pounds for 6 cans but they last for a while unless you love it so much and cook with it on a daily basis.
Now this recipe is a bit of a mash-up. I used a recipe from Laura Adamache, Soup a la Grec and made it my own. I added spices to the jackfruit that are typically used for chicken to give it a chicken-ish flavour.
Now you can add more root vegetables to the soup than I did. That's all I had in my fridge/pantry so that is all I used. But you can add some parsnips and celeriac to give it a deeper flavour and be more filling. I would avoid potatoes. That would be just a bit weird, I think.
If you don't want rice in your soup you can swap that as well for very fine pasta. In the UK you can find soup pasta as I call it, usually at a Polish shop.
So here is my recipe:
One last word of advice. Make sure you do not overcook the jackfruit in the oven. You don't want it to go a brownish colour but to stay pale. In my oven, it seemed 15 minutes to be perfect. Even if the jackfruit is cooked until it has gone brown, it will still taste nice but look more like pork than chicken. I was a bit hungry and didn't wait until I added the egg mixture to the soup, so the egg cooked and it looks like white shreds. Doesn't take away from the taste and makes it look even more convincing.
Hope you enjoy it!
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