Gluten-Free Lemon Orzo Soup

The Orzo

If you’re gluten-free (like me), you understand the struggles of finding a wide variety of gluten-free pasta. While most grocery stores offer a wide selection of boxed pasta, finding speciality pasta can be a little more difficult. For example, the orzo used in this soup wasn’t the easiest to find.

Luckily, Amazon has it all! This gluten-free orzo from Delallo is a wheat-free alternative to orzo pasta. Not only does it hold well (no mushy pasta here!) but you can hardly tell it’s gluten-free! This orzo is by far the best gluten-free alternative I’ve found and I would highly recommend trying it.

The Base

A good soup is all about the base. Like the majority of soup recipes, the base of our Lemon Orzo Soup is made up of onions, carrots, and celery. This mixture is called a “ mirepoix“, and is a flavor base used for most soup or stew recipes. This French term simply refers to cooking a mixture of diced onions, carrots and celery with butter over low heat for an extended amount of time. The correct way to cook a mirepoix is not by sautéing, but by caramelizing the vegetables. This cooking technique is signature to the French cuisine.

But back to our soup. For our base, we’re going to start by adding two tablespoons of unsalted butter to a large pot or Dutch oven. Once the butter has melted, add half a diced yellow onion, four cups of chopped carrots, and two cups of diced celery. Then, season with salt and pepper. Reduce the heat to low and occasionally stir this mixture to prevent burning for roughly ten minutes.

The Next Steps

After ten minutes, add three cloves of minced garlic and almost a cup of a dry white wine. The wine will help caramelize the vegetables and give the soup a richer flavor. Stir until almost all of the wine has been absorbed, then turn the heat up to medium-high. Next, add the juice from one lemon and six cups of chicken broth. Add in four sprigs of rosemary and six sprigs of thyme before pouring one cup of gluten-free pasta into the pot.

Reduce the heat to medium and stir occasionally for roughly 20 minutes. Once the orzo doubles in size and looks fluffy, add in two cups of cooked and shredded chicken breasts. While you can cook your own, you can also use store-bought rotisserie chicken to save time. Stir in the chicken, then reduce the heat to low and cover for 10 minutes. This will allow the chicken to absorb the flavors of the soup.

Finally, remove the soup from the heat. Garnish with sliced lemons and fresh parsley.

Tastes Like…

This soup may tastes familiar, even if you’ve never had it. That may be because it reminds you of a mixture of chicken noodle soup and Greek avgolemono soup. Avgolemono soup, or egg-lemon soup, is made with egg yolk and lemon juice mixed with broth, heated until they thicken. While our Lemon Orzo Soup has familiar ingredients, avgolemono soup is much different due to the thickness and broth made from a mixture of egg yolk.