This Olive Garden Chicken Gnocchi Soup Copycat Is Delicious
Kitchn’s Delicious Links column highlights recipes we’re excited about from the bloggers we love. Follow along every weekday as we post our favorites.
If you’ve ever fallen in love with Olive Garden’s chicken gnocchi soup, you are not alone. The internet is full of different bloggers’ takes on this fan-favorite soup, which combines chicken, gnocchi, and a ton of cream into a rich, velvety soup that’s so comforting it’s basically a fuzzy blanket in a bowl. It’s difficult to go wrong with any recipe that calls for you to throw chicken, cream, and pasta into a pot and let it simmer until it tastes delicious, but this particular take on the OG classic stands out by being fast enough to cook on any weeknight.
There’s a fine art to copying a beloved restaurant dish. Big ingredients like chicken, spinach, and pasta are easy to identify on sight, but it takes a lot more than that to capture the je ne sais quoi of a restaurant classic. Just what is the secret ingredient that makes a restaurant dish so special? (Usually it’s butter. Just wild, unbelievable amounts of butter.)
This recipe calls for no butter at all, but gets its creaminess from a mixture of chicken broth and half-and-half. The soup starts with the classic mixture of celery, onions, carrots, and garlic sautéed in olive oil until the onions are translucent. Then it’s mixed with chicken broth, thyme, and cooked, skinless chicken meat. This recipe does not take very long to cook at all, and as soon as the chicken broth is boiling, you’re ready to add the gnocchi.
The gnocchi cook in the broth until they’re nice and tender, and at that point you just stir in half-and-half and spinach, taste for seasonings, and it’s ready to serve. Because the recipe starts with cooked chicken, nothing much needs to cook for very long. It’s practically as quick to make this recipe as it is to just boil the gnocchi on its own.
Get the Recipe: Olive Garden Chicken Gnocchi Soup from La Creme de la Crumb
