Gingery, garlicky chicken soup is a keeper

If you cook regularly, you probably have a stash of recipes that you consider “keepers” — the ones you make again and again because you love the flavor and they always turn out just right.

But do you have 100 such recipes? Me neither.

For her third cookbook, “Smitten Kitchen Keepers,” food blogger and author Deb Perelman decided to gather only recipes that met those stringent criteria.

“I realized how much I wanted to be able to hand my kids a collection of recipes specifically written with making them forever in mind,” she writes in the introduction to her third cookbook.

Perelman began her Smitten Kitchen cooking site in 2006, and in the years since, she has amassed a loyal fan base with her comforting, straightforward cooking. She has more than 1.5 million followers on her delicious Instagram. (If you love to cook or are just learning to cook and you’re not following her on social media, do yourself a favor and start.)

She’s also gathered lots of knowledge and real-life experience. Perelman claims to have read every one of the 350,000 comments posted to her recipes because she wants to anticipate the challenges home cooks might face. For this cookbook, she writes that she worked through more than 500 recipe ideas to arrive at these 100 sweet and savory dishes.

The appeal of Perelman’s recipes is that she makes them at home, in her small New York kitchen, and her ingredients are, for most folks, easily accessible.

When I read that this soup was the first recipe she developed for the cookbook, I decided to try it. She says it is her go-to soup on a chilly weeknight.

The soup provides fine examples of what makes her recipes so popular.

Often, she includes tips that are transferrable to cooking in general. In this recipe, she notes that instead of buying chicken stock, she simmers boneless, skinless chicken thighs — fattier and so much more flavorful than the breast meat — with aromatics to create a base. Then she adds the ginger and garlic to give what would be a mild, comforting soup some oomph.

She also frequently shares a little something that’s easy to do but gives the dish a bit of polish. In this case, the soup is finished at the table with a quick sauce made of Chinkiang vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil and chili crisp for heat.

And Perelman anticipates issues that might arise for home cooks. For example, she notes that you should add the noodles right before serving or they will keep “drinking” the broth until there is little left.

(I live in a house of two, and this soup makes 12 cups, so that cued me to think about this issue as I was cooking. I knew we would not eat this in one sitting, so I cooked the noodles separately, drained them and added them to the serving bowls before ladling over the soup. Then I stored the noodles and soup separately in the fridge.)

I made the soup twice, loved it and then asked a friend to try it out as well. She served it at a dinner party and got raves all around.

Is it a keeper? Yes. And so is this cookbook.

Justin Tsucalas/For the Washington Post Chicken and aromatics are used to make the broth. Then the chicken is removed and shredded into bite-size pieces before being returned to the broth just before serving.