The first step is to get the chicken ready for the soup. We’ll only be using the bones of the whole chicken in the soup. The meat you can bake in a roasting bag with seasoning and serve alongside the soup or shred and add it to the soup.

The next step and the first one in getting the soup underway is to add the chicken carcass to a pot, add boiling water, let it boil for about 1-2 minutes and then drain the water.

After draining the first water, add freshly boiled water to the chicken carcass. You’ll want to add about 3.5 liters or roughly about 1 gallon of boiling water. Bring the pot to a boil, turn the heat slightly down, and let the water simmer for about 30 minutes. This is the start of our chicken stock.

After 30 minutes, add roughly sliced onions and carrots to the stock and continue simmering it for about 10-15 minutes.

While the stock is simmering, make the homemade egg noodles. In Moldova, they’re called “tăiței de casă,” which translates to homemade noodles. You can skip this step if you want to by just using store-bought noodles (you can buy noodles, Italian Tagliatelle, or fettuccine) but the homemade noodles are so much better and they are quite easy to make. You’ll just need eggs and plain flour.

Coming back to our soup, once 10-15 minutes passed after adding the carrots and onions, add the diced celery, bell pepper, bay leaves, and black pepper.

In a separate pot, mix the tomato passata (400ml or 1 and 2/3 cups) and “borș acru” or bran (500 ml or about 2 cups) and bring to a boil. It’s now ready to be added to the soup.

After about 5-7 minutes from when we added the celery and pepper, we’ll add the noodles and the passata-bran mixture.

Once the egg noodles have lifted, give it a taste and add salt and pepper (as needed) and fresh herbs (we added parsley)