Chicken and chickpea soup: four servings, 36 g protein each

The usual question about soup: can a bowl of it stand in for a proper meal, or will you be back at the fridge an hour later? With chicken and chickpeas in the pot it holds up. This version works out at roughly 36 g of protein a serving, cooks in one pan, and tastes better on day two than on day one.

Prep time and servings

Prep: 15 min. Cooking: 30 min. Total: 45 min. Serves: 4 (about 450 ml a bowl).

Dice the chicken while the onion and carrot soften and most of the prep disappears into the cooking time, which brings the whole job down to about 35 minutes.

Ingredients

• 500 g skinless, boneless chicken breast, cut into 2 cm cubes
• 240 g drained tinned chickpeas (one 400 g tin)
• 1.2 l low-salt chicken stock or water
• 120 g onion (1 medium), finely chopped
• 150 g carrot (2 medium), sliced
• 100 g celery (2 sticks), sliced
• 8 g garlic (2 cloves), chopped
• 200 g passata
• 20 ml olive oil (2 tbsp)
• 5 g ground cumin (1 tsp)
• 5 g sweet paprika (1 tsp)
• 20 ml lemon juice (half a lemon)
• 10 g fresh parsley
• salt and black pepper to taste

Method

1. Heat the olive oil in a large pan over a medium heat. Add the onion, carrot and celery and cook for 6–7 minutes, stirring now and then, until the onion turns soft and translucent.
2. Add the garlic, cumin and paprika. Stir for about 60 seconds, just until the spices smell warm. Burn them and the whole pot turns bitter.
3. Tip in the chicken and fry for 3–4 minutes until the outside turns white. It does not need to cook through here; it finishes in the liquid.
4. Pour in the passata, stir, and let it bubble for 2 minutes to cook off the sharp edge.
5. Add the stock and the drained, well-rinsed chickpeas. Bring to the boil, then drop the heat to a gentle simmer.
6. Simmer uncovered for 18–20 minutes. The chicken is done when it pulls apart into strands under a fork.
7. For a thicker bowl, lift out a ladle of chickpeas with a little liquid, mash them with a fork and stir them back in. That thickens the soup without flour or cream.
8. Take the pan off the heat, then stir through the lemon juice, salt, pepper and chopped parsley. The lemon goes in last — a long simmer flattens it.

Nutrition per serving

These figures are an estimate per serving, calculated from the quantities above and divided by four. Real numbers shift with how lean the chicken is and how much stock and salt you use.

• Calories: about 345 kcal
• Protein: about 36 g
• Carbohydrate: about 26 g (roughly 7 g of it fibre)
• Fat: about 9 g

For 345 calories that is a strong ratio, with protein carrying close to half the energy in the bowl. If you are aiming at 1.6–2.2 g of protein per kilo of body weight a day, one serving covers somewhere between a fifth and a third of the daily total for a 75 kg person.

Swaps and variations

Chicken thigh instead of breast adds roughly 5 g of fat and 45 calories a serving and takes about 3 g off the protein. It also stays juicier if you plan to reheat the soup several times.

Meat-free version: drop the chicken, double the chickpeas (480 g drained) and add 150 g red lentils. Protein falls to around 18 g a serving, so pair the bowl with a slice of bread and curd cheese or a boiled egg.

White beans work in place of chickpeas, and so does quinoa or buckwheat — add quinoa for the last 15 minutes only, or it collapses.

Want it hotter? Half a teaspoon of chilli flakes with the other spices. Creamier? Stir 100 g Greek yoghurt into the bowl rather than the pan; in boiling liquid it splits.

The soup keeps 3 days in the fridge and about 2 months in the freezer. On days when there is no chicken cooked and no time to cook any, tinned tuna gets protein into the bowl in a minute.

In short

One pan, 45 minutes, four servings at roughly 36 g protein and 345 calories each. The chicken carries the protein, the chickpeas bring fibre and staying power, and the lemon at the end stops the whole thing tasting flat. For a similar macro profile in a drier, faster meal, air fryer chicken with rice does the same job, and a bulgur and chicken salad covers the days you eat at your desk.