This One Ingredient Takes Chicken Noodle Soup From Good To Great

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Almost everyone has the recipe. You know the one — the chicken noodle soup that your entire family swears by that's handed down through sticky notes and scribbled margins that supposedly cures everything from winter colds to broken hearts, and nobody's allowed to mess with it. Except maybe you should! Not with some wild ingredient that'll have your grandmother questioning your judgment, but just a touch of this one seasoning that, we promise, can elevate your soup: Vegeta.

Never heard of it? Join the club. Despite being a kitchen staple in Europe ever since it went on sale in 1959, this Croatian seasoning hasn't quite caught on in America. The powder is composed of dried and ground-down veggies (carrots, celery, parsley, and so on), seasoned with salt, spices, and MSG (there's also an MSG-free version if you'd rather avoid it). What you get is an intensely flavorful and umami seasoning that can pick up the taste of anything from soups and broths to stews and sauces. The formula's so simple, you can actually make it yourself — handy if you're in a rush and don't want to wait on Amazon or Walmart.

Vegeta couldn't be easier to use — add 2 to 3 teaspoons to your simmering pot and the rehydrated vegetables will dissolve right into the broth, layering on flavor. Want to get a little fancy with it? Try this: Add Vegeta after sauteing your aromatics but before you deglaze. A minute in the hot oil can bring out all those concentrated flavors (we call this "blooming") before the broth softens them. If you're working with store-bought broth that tastes a little flat, dissolve Vegeta into the simmering liquid during the last few minutes of cooking — you'd have a hard time telling it came out of a carton.

Want even more depth? Dust the raw chicken pieces with Vegeta before they hit the pot. Combined with the seasoning already swimming in your broth, the chicken itself becomes another layer of umami-rich flavor. The recipe's barely changed at all, but we guarantee the family will ask if you've changed anything in there and why it tastes a bit different — the good kind of different. It delivers precisely the satisfying, hard-to-pin-down deliciousness that makes homemade chicken noodle soup the wholesome cure-all it's always been.