Recipe: Chicken Broil Butterball Soup

My grandfather’s parents moved to Michigan from Russia when they were teenagers. They did not speak Russian, however, but German as they were part of a group of Germans who’d been living in Russia for many generations along the Volga river. Known as “Russian Germans” or “Volga Germans”, they brought their culinary culture with them that while including both German and Russian influences was uniquely their own. My grandfather grew up on these dishes and his wife, my grandmother, learned to cook many of them. One of these dishes is butterball soup.

No matter how well we game out the purchase of take out Chicken Broil meals we always have leftovers. While my 5 year old daughter was able to almost finish off her half-of-a-chicken, my mother and father-in-laws decided to share one, so when the table was cleared, we had a ton of chicken bones and ample leftover chicken to work with as well as a few radishes, a container of coleslaw, and 2 buns.

As an obsessive soup-stock maker I knew the bones wouldn’t go to waste but this year I decided to try to use all of the leftovers in a Volga German-inspired soup. This is what I came up with. Immediately after I took the photos for this article, I ate the entire bowl of soup. It is good.

 Ingredients:

leftover Chicken Broil chicken & chicken bones (the chicken from 6 meals made more stock than needed for this recipe)

1 container of Chicken Broil coleslaw

4 radishes

4 leftover rolls

4 Tablespoons butter

salt

(optional: peelings and scraps carrots, onions, garlic, celery)

Step 1: Remove all of the good meat from the bones, skin and connective tissue and set the meat aside. Place bones, etc. in pot. Add scraps of carrots, celery, onions, garlic or, if you don’t have scraps, you can cut up a carrot, celery, onion & a couple of garlic cloves, if you want to. Add salt to taste. The water should taste slightly less salty than you want your finished soup broth to taste.

Step 2: Fill with water so the bones are just covered and bring to a boil. Cover. Turn down to a simmer and simmer for 4 hours (more is okay). Strain out the solids, reserving the stock.

Step 3: Slice the radishes very thinly.

Step 4: While the stock is simmering, make butterballs out of leftover rolls. If you don’t have Chicken Broil rolls you can use bread. Rip into little pieces into a bowl. For every roll add a tablespoon of room temperature butter. Add a few dashes of salt a pepper (to taste) and mash with your hands until you have evenly distributed the butter throughout the dough. Roll butterballs one and at time and set aside.

Step 5: To two quarts of simmering hot stock add the sliced radishes and butterballs. Simmer for a few minutes. Remove from heat. Add the coleslaw. Stir. Add salt and pepper to taste if needed. Serve.

Note: While the coleslaw does give it a hot and sour soup flavor not originally found in butterball soup, I think my Volga German ancestors would approve, as it is hard to get much more Volga German than cabbage.

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by Sara Swanson

Sara Swanson is an editor, writer and founder of the Manchester Mirror.