Crockpot chicken tortilla soup

1. vegetables

2. Just a few basics.

3. The key to these is to dice them pretty finely.

4. For the Serrano pepper, I left the seeds in. You could take them out though if you’re worried about the heat.

5. Then just toss all this stuff into your slow cooker!
chopped

6. A fine dice.

7. Besides the veggies you need a few other things to get this soup going.

8. This is where a lot of the flavor comes from in this soup.
addins

9. Flavor town.

10. Add all this stuff to the crockpot along with your chicken breasts. I would shoot for about a pound of chicken but you could use more if you wanted.

11. For the chipotle pepper, make sure you dice it very finely. Nobody wants a big bite of chipotle in their soup.

12. For the dried peppers, you can use almost any dried pepper. I went with New Mexico chile peppers, but poblanos would work also. Just break up the dried peppers into a few pieces and scrape out the seeds. Then throw the dried pieces into the crockpot along with the chicken breasts.
all in

13. Everybody in the pot!

14. Add in all your chicken stock which should just barely cover all the ingredients.
A Slow Cook

15. Set your crockpot to a low heat and let this sucker cook, covered, for at least six hours. If you wanted you could cook it for even longer though. Six hours is the minimum.

16. After that, your house will smell amazing and your soup will look something like this.
after cook

17. 6 hours later...
Finishing the Soup

18. There’s a few things we need to do to finish this soup now that most of the cooking is done.

19. For starters, take out the bay leaves and dried peppers from the soup and discard them. They’ve given the soup plenty of flavor and there’s no need to hang on to them.

20. Next, take out the chicken breasts and use a few forks to gently shred the meat. Then you can return it to the crockpot.
shredded

21. Get it?

22. Finally, there are three new ingredients that I recommend adding at this point as they don’t need to simmer all day long.

23. First, add some corn and cilantro sprigs. Second, cube up a few corn tortillas and add those cubes straight to the soup.
more

24. Just some more flavor!

25. Cover this and let it simmer for another 30-45 minutes. The tortillas will soften and some will completely disintegrate into the soup which will give it a really rich texture. The cilantro will give the soup a nice herb flavor.

26. After it’s second cooking, remove the cilantro stalks and season the soup generously with salt and pepper.
The Garnishes

27. My favorite part of chicken tortilla soup is serving it with tons of fun garnishes and toppings and then people can kind of make their own bowls.

28. The essential topping (in my opinion) is crispy tortilla strips. These are super-easy to make. Just cut a few corn tortillas into long strips and bake them at 350 degrees for about 15-20 minutes.

29. The strips will be lightly browned when the are done and super-crispy.
garnish

30. Great garnish.

31. Some other topping ideas that I like are sliced avocado, crumbled cotija cheese (or any cheese really), sour cream, and lime wedges.
fun stuff

32. Some other fun add-ins.

33. Once your soup is seasoned well with salt and pepper just ladle it into a bowl and pile on the toppings!
soup

34. From above.

35. It’s actually a very filling meal for soup because of the chicken, tortillas, and cheese. It’s very warming and just a complete winner of a meal in my book.

36. Don’t be daunted by the ingredient list here, people. You can and should give this a shot sometime this winter!