Slow Cooker Greek Lemon Chicken Soup {Avgolemono}

posted on February 23, 2016

Slow Cooker Greek Lemon Chicken Soup {Avgolemono}, is a lightened up classic Greek soup made even easier in the slow cooker!

My slow cooker spree continues with this Slow Cooker Greek Lemon Chicken Soup {Avgolemono}! This soup was inspired by the classic Greek soup that I’ve loved from the moment I first tasted it years ago.

This is not the traditional Greek way to make avgolemono, but I came up with this version when I wasn’t feeling well and I wanted avgolemono without the fuss. Why did I have to have this particular chicken soup? Because it takes traditional chicken soup to a whole new level with a rich and creamy egg-lemon broth. You may never want regular chicken noodle soup again after you try this. 🙂

As many of you know, I’m part Greek. My grandfather on my dad’s side of the family was from Greece, so I grew up with a last name that everybody butchered. And no, I’ve never broken plates or yelled “opa!”, but I grew up eating my grandfather’s Greek leg of lamb (recipe coming at some point!), my aunt’s spanakopita and baklava, and gone to countless Greek festivals and danced Greek-style with my family.

My grandfather and my aunt died many years ago, and I never eat Greek food without thinking of them.

Now I need to give you a little background on what makes this soup so special. For starters, “avgolemono” (pronounced av-go-lemon-o just in case you were wondering!), means egg-lemon in Greek. In Greek cooking, avgolemono is often a sauce served with chicken and rice, or used as a rich broth in this soup. It’s the egg-lemon mixture that sets this soup apart from basic chicken soup, and once you try it, there’s no going back!

Maybe the sound of egg in chicken soup might sound strange to you? If you didn’t know there was egg in it, you wouldn’t be able to tell…you might even think it was cream-based.

Many avgolemono soups contain more eggs than I’ve used here, but as I’ve told you before, I like foods with some richness without being over the top. That means I’ve lightened this up for you, going with 2 eggs instead of the 3-5 you might find in traditional recipes. And naturally, I went big on the lemon juice because I love my citrus. 🙂

The recipe for this Slow Cooker Greek Lemon Chicken Soup {Avgolemono} is beyond easy, as you’ll see from the video below. You just drop the onion, celery, garlic, chicken, orzo or rice, stock, and water with some salt, and get cooking. I cooked mine on high for 3 hours because I was in a hurry as usual, but you can cook yours on low for 5-6 hours.

The egg-lemon mixture comes into the picture after the soup is done cooking. Obviously, adding egg to hot soup could result in the unthinkable…scrambled eggs. To keep this from happening, we have to temper our egg-lemon mixture by slowly adding 1 cup of the hot broth to it.

Whisking constantly, add a few droplets of the hot broth a time, then gradually build up to a slow, steady stream until all of the liquid has been added. I included a video with this recipe just so could see how easy the process really is!

A couple of notes about this Slow Cooker Greek Lemon Chicken Soup {Avgolemono}:

If you want it richer, add at least one more egg.
To make it gluten-free, use rice. If you do use rice, you may find that the rice is quite mushy leaving it in the slow cooker that long. If you’re home, you can add it during the last hour or so of cooking, or toss in some leftover cooked rice and just let it simmer in the soup until warm.
The orzo definitely held its shape better than the rice did, so that’s my preference unless I’m using leftover rice.
Start with 1/4 cup lemon juice to start with, and add more if you like it really lemony like me.
Again, this is not the traditional method of making avgolemono — I’m pretty sure that no Greek grandmother on the planet makes it like this, and that’s ok. Sometimes we just need easy. I know I do. 🙂

Want more avgolemono?

30-Minute Chicken with Greek Avgolemono Sauce

Checkout the video below, and you can find me on YouTube here!