The Best Spices For Chicken Soup – 10 Spices You Should Try

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Chicken soup is a delicious and relatively easy dish to make. Extremely satisfying, comforting, nourishing, and healthy we can enjoy chicken soup for lunch and dinner, as a side dish, and as an appetizer.

The Best Spices For Chicken Soup - 10 Spices You Should Try

However, the key to making the best chicken soup lies in the herbs and spices you use to make it. Without herbs and spices, chicken soup is essentially just chicken-flavored water.

It’s the inclusion of various spices that gives chicken soup the intense flavors we’ve all come to love. Therefore, you need to know what spices to add to your soup if you’re going to make the best chicken soup.

Luckily for you, you’ve come to the right place!

In this post, you’ll find a list of the best spices for chicken soup. Today, we’ll tell you more about each spice and what you can expect.

Let’s not waste any more time, let’s take a look at our list!

Quick Answer: Best Spices For Chicken Soup

There is a wide range of spices we can use to bring more flavor to homemade chicken soup. However, 10 spices stand out more than the others. The best spices for chicken soup are:

  • Garlic Powder
  • Paprika
  • Bay Leaf
  • Parsley
  • Coriander
  • Thyme
  • Rosemary
  • Oregano
  • Marjoram
  • Onion Powder

These are the go-to spices you should use if you want to make a chicken soup that has a powerful burst of flavor.

It’s also worth knowing that you can mix and match these spices together to create a more interesting flavor profile.

10 Spices You Should Try In Your Chicken Soup

We’re going to get straight into the main part of this post so you know exactly which spices to use when making chicken soup. We’ll kick things off with garlic powder!

1. Garlic Powder

The Best Spices For Chicken Soup - 10 Spices You Should Try

Garlic powder is one of the best spices you can use in a chicken soup if you want to quickly add intense flavors to your soup.

This spice has a stronger flavor than fresh garlic cloves and it will provide your chicken soup with a richer flavor. Thanks to its strong flavor, we only need to add small amounts of garlic powder to our soup.

The best thing you can do is add the powder in small amounts so that you can delicately control the flavor of your soup.

2. Paprika

The Best Spices For Chicken Soup - 10 Spices You Should Try

Paprika is a hugely popular spice and with good reason. This bright red spice is a top choice if you want to bring powerful flavors and vibrance to a chicken soup.

One of the great things about paprika is that it is available in a variety of different variations. Therefore, we can choose different types of paprika to bring more interesting flavors to a soup.

Smoky, sweet, and spicy paprika spices are your best bet as they pack the biggest punch.

As you would expect, a smoky paprika will impart a smoky flavor, a sweet paprika will offer extra sweetness, and a spicy paprika will bring the heat.

3. Bay Leaf

The Best Spices For Chicken Soup - 10 Spices You Should Try

Bay leaf is one of the best spices for chicken soup if you only need to add a subtle flavor to your dish. This spice offers a woody and earthy flavor to any recipe it’s used in.

In a chicken soup recipe, bay leaf will add a deeper flavor, adding a new dimension to your recipe. Bay leaf is also a type of flavor conditioner.

What this means is that it improves the taste of all the other ingredients in a dish.

We don’t recommend using bay leaves on their own in a chicken soup because it doesn’t have a strong enough flavor.

4. Parsley

The Best Spices For Chicken Soup - 10 Spices You Should Try

The next spice on our list of best spices for chicken soup is parsley. Parsley is a great spice to use if you want to bring a touch of freshness to your soup.

Parsley only has a subtle flavor so you will want to use other spices too, but the flavors it offers do bring a homely, and herby flavor to a chicken soup.

Dried parsley should be added to your soup towards the end of cooking so that the flavors don’t cook away.

5. Coriander

The Best Spices For Chicken Soup - 10 Spices You Should Try

Also commonly known as cilantro, coriander can be added to a chicken soup if you want to bring zesty flavors to the party.

Coriander has a fresh citrus flavor that compliments the savory and meaty flavor of chicken beautifully.

Coriander is typically used in most Asian and Mexican recipes. Therefore, it is a good spice to use if you want to bring some Asian and Mexican flair to your chicken soup recipe.

Coriander is one of the most important spices to add to a spice blend as it offers a unique flavor.

6. Thyme

The Best Spices For Chicken Soup - 10 Spices You Should Try

Thyme is one of the most commonly used spices in roast and fried chicken recipes. As a result, it only makes sense to use it in a chicken soup recipe too.

In terms of flavor, thyme has a diverse earthy, minty, citrusy, and slightly sweet flavor that has a lot to offer.

It’s arguably the only spice on this list that can be used on its own in a chicken soup. Thyme has a very strong flavor so we recommend using it in small amounts.

7. Rosemary

The Best Spices For Chicken Soup - 10 Spices You Should Try

Rosemary has a naturally oily and aromatic sweetness that goes perfectly with chicken. Rosemary is another spice used in most chicken recipes.

Adding rosemary to your chicken soup recipe will add a strong depth of flavor to the vegetables in your soup too. This makes it a strong option in most vegetable soup recipes as well.

You can add rosemary to your soup early in the cooking process so all the ingredients have a chance to soak up the flavors.

8. Oregano

The Best Spices For Chicken Soup - 10 Spices You Should Try

If you want to bring a fresh Mediterranean flavor to your chicken soup, you have to use oregano.

Oregano is a fresh, sweet, and herby spice that has an intense flavor. It is most commonly used in Greek and Italian cooking. Compared to other spices, oregano has a much stronger flavor.

This spice is perfect for a light and flavorful summer chicken soup.

9. Marjoram

The Best Spices For Chicken Soup - 10 Spices You Should Try

If you don’t have any oregano, you could use marjoram instead. Marjoram has a similar profile to oregano. In fact, this spice has a stronger flavor than oregano.

Therefore, the two spices shouldn’t be used together. Instead, we would use one of the two spices as a substitute for the other.

When it comes to flavor, marjoram has a slightly sweet flavor that goes nicely with a savory chicken soup broth.

10. Onion Powder

The Best Spices For Chicken Soup - 10 Spices You Should Try

We like to use onion powder to deepen the flavor of our chicken soup. Onion powder essentially does the same job as fresh onions but without the added hassle of cutting and cooking the onions.

Onion is generally a key aromatic ingredient in most soups so it only makes sense to use it in chicken soup too.

Onion powder has a well-balanced flavor so you can add plenty of it to your soup without overpowering it.

What Is A Spice Blend?

A spice blend is a combination of different herbs and spices. They usually contain at least four or five different herbs and spices that complement each other perfectly.

Spice blends give us a more convenient way to quickly add flavor to a recipe without having to use lots of different ingredients. Instead, we can simply sprinkle some of the blend on our food.

We can use spice blends to enhance the flavors of almost any dish.

Can You Use Spice Blends In Chicken Soup?

You’ll probably be pleased to hear that we can use spice blends in chicken soup. In fact, we’d recommend it.

Many cooks prefer to prepare a spice blend in advance using their favorite herbs and spices. This saves time in the kitchen when it comes to adding spices to a dish.

You can do exactly the same when making chicken soup. You can make a large batch of spice blend using your favorite spices and some of the spices from our list.

How To Make A Chicken Soup Spice Blend?

If you’re going to make a flavorful spice blend for your chicken soup, you need to know what spices to use.

While all the spices on our list work in chicken soup, they don’t all work together. Therefore, different chicken soup spice blends will contain different spices.

To make your life easier, we’ve listed the spices you need to make a homemade chicken soup spice blend below. To make the blend, simply mix the spices together.

  • 1 part pepper
  • 3 parts thyme
  • 1 part marjoram
  • 2 parts rosemary
  • 1 part onion powder
  • ½ paprika
  • ½ garlic powder

Final Thoughts

Now you’ve made your way through this post, you should know exactly which spices you can use to make a delicious chicken soup.

There are other spices you can use for chicken soup, but the ones we’ve looked at are the very best.

We’ve been sure to include a wide range of spices so you can find the spice that best suits the flavor profile you’re looking for. We’ve even shown you how to make a chicken soup spice blend.

A chicken soup spice blend is great for quickly giving a chicken soup more flavor, so why don’t you make an aromatic spice blend to use in your soup right now?

You could experiment with different spice combinations or make the spice blend we’ve already shown you.

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