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I love to cook for my two sons and my boyfriend, Ray. Now that my sons are young adults, I don’t get to cook for them very often. But on the rare night the three of us are home for dinner together, I tend to keep it to our family’s greatest hits: chicken pot pie, French dip, the retro Impossible Bacon Pie, or grilled cheese and tomato soup.
When I cook for Ray, though, I frequently try new recipes. A few weeks ago, he asked if I’d make chicken corn chowder. I didn’t have a go-to recipe, so I turned to Allrecipes’ extensive recipe base and chose Easy Chicken and Corn Chowder, which has more than 200 reviews and 4.7 stars.
Before buying the ingredients for the chicken corn chowder, I read some of the comments, which always offer sharp insights into how to improve the recipe. Several community members added bacon to the chowder and some even recommended replacing some or all of the butter in the recipe with the fat leftover from cooking the bacon—which I realized is the secret to taking the recipe from delicious to out-of-this-world delicious.
How To Make Chicken Corn Chowder with Bacon
The list of ingredients in this chowder recipe is pretty straightforward. Onion, carrots, celery, and garlic are sautéed in butter. Then flour is added to thicken the soup. That’s all simmered with diced potatoes, shredded chicken, corn kernels, chicken stock, and half-and-half until cooked through. Finally, it’s seasoned with a pinch of nutmeg plus salt and pepper.
Adding bacon and bacon fat to this recipe is easy. Cook about half a pound of bacon until it’s nice and crispy using your preferred cooking method such as on the stovetop, in the oven, or in an air fryer. Just make sure you’re able to gather the bacon fat when you’re done, which means using the microwave isn’t recommended for this because the paper towels the bacon cooks on will absorb the fat.
Crumble the finished bacon and set it aside to add to the soup at the same time you mix in the chicken and corn. Pour the bacon fat into a measuring cup. The recipe calls for using a half cup (1 stick) of butter. If you have a half cup of bacon fat, use it in place of the butter. But if you don’t have that much, add as much butter as you need to equal half a cup. I had five tablespoons of bacon fat, so I only needed three tablespoons of butter. I used the combination of bacon fat and butter to sauté the onion, carrots, celery, and garlic.
Besides incorporating bacon and bacon fat, I followed the rest of the recipe to a T. The result was a super flavorful, smoky, hearty, warming chicken corn chowder that I served it with crusty bread and an off-dry Riesling. Perfection.
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