Recipe: Soto ayam from Emma de Thouars’ new cookbook

In her book Noodles, our former colleague Emma de Thouars shares 40 noodle recipes, from an ultra-quick 1-minute noodle sauce to buttery breakfast noodles, ice-cold kimchi noodles, and Korean corn dogs with ramen crispies. Often vegetarian, but there are also dishes for chicken lovers, such as this soto ayam.

In Noodles, Emma shows that making a serving of noodles is even easier than throwing together ‘a quick pasta’. Fresh, fatty spring onion and ginger noodles, for example, and instant noodles with a sexy broth. And what about irresistibly delicious crispy noodles with seafood or delicious spaghetti vongole? She also explains how to easily make noodles yourself, such as homemade biang biang noodles with hot oil. Most of the recipes in the book are vegetarian, and when they aren’t, she often gives a vegetarian option, as with this recipe for delicious soto ayam.

Emma’s soto ayam

Emma: ‘This Indonesian chicken soup contains plenty of lime leaves and a lemongrass stalk to make it wonderfully fresh. The boemboe is otherwise quite simple, but the yellow turmeric and rich coconut cream make it beautifully golden-yellow and glossy. Be careful with light-coloured bowls, though—the turmeric stains them quickly and is difficult to remove. You have been warned.’

How to make soto ayam

• Roughly chop the shallots, garlic, ginger and lemongrass.
• Remove the veins from the makrut lime leaves and cut the leaves into pieces.
• Put the shallot, garlic, ginger, lemongrass, makrut lime leaves, coriander powder and turmeric powder in a mini food processor and purée into a boemboe. Add a little oil if necessary so that it comes together. If you don’t have a mini food processor, you can also chop everything very finely.
• Heat a few tablespoons of oil in a Dutch oven and fry the boemboe (or all the chopped ingredients together with the spices) for about 12 minutes. The oil should be orange and the shallots soft, almost jammy.
• Pour 750 millilitres of water over everything and add the chicken thigh. Bring to the boil, lower the heat and let everything simmer gently for 45 minutes, until the chicken is cooked and falls off the bone.
• Remove the chicken from the broth and leave it to cool briefly.
• Add the coconut cream to the broth and season with salt. Broth always tastes unpleasant and musty until it contains enough salt. So keep tasting and add salt until it tastes good.
• Cut the pointed cabbage into strips and blanch for 30 to 60 seconds in the soup.
• Bring a pan of salted water to the boil. Cook the noodles according to the instructions on the package. Meanwhile, pull the chicken from the bone.
• Divide the noodles between two bowls and pour the broth with pointed cabbage over them. Cut the boiled egg in half. Put some chicken and half a boiled egg in each bowl on top of the soup, and finish with the fried onions and sambal.

Make it vegetarian: of course, you can no longer call it soto ayam, but you can also leave out the chicken and add celery, carrot, spring onion, dried shiitake and a quartered onion to the broth. Let it simmer for about 45 minutes, then remove the vegetables and you’ll have a delicious vegetarian broth. Cut tofu into cubes and let it simmer in the broth for a few minutes so it absorbs the flavours. You can then call it ‘soto tahu’.