This hearty and delicious bone broth udon soup is an excellent way to use some freshly made homemade bone broth. With ginger, garlic, onion, and fennel, it’s a tasty and warming dish for any night of the week.
Udon noodles are thick Japanese wheat flour noodles, usually served in a dashi broth. This recipe serves them in a rich, warm bone broth.
How to Make Bone Broth Udon Soup
To make bone broth udon soup, you will need the following ingredients: chicken backbones or carcasses, ginger, garlic, bay leaf, peppercorns, scallions, fennel, onion, jalapeño (optional), and frozen udon noodles.
Ahead of time, you will need to make bone broth. For more in-depth info on bone broth, visit my post A Complete Bone Broth Guide.
To begin, add all your chicken bones, carcass, and vegetable ingredients to a stockpot, slow cooker, or Instant Pot.
Cover all the ingredients with water. Bring the water to a boil, then reduce until it’s lightly simmering. Cover with the lid of the stockpot and leave for 24-48 hours.
Now, using the broth that you made in advance, you can make the tasty udon noodle soup.
Cook your udon noodles in boiling water until tender (bear in mind the cooking time will be different depending on whether the udon noodles are dried, frozen, etc)
If you’re short on time and want to cook your noodles from frozen, there’s no need to defrost them first! Place the frozen noodles into boiling water and cook until tender, about 1 minute.
Once the noodles are ready, warm your bone broth, and pour 3 ladles of the broth into a bowl with your udon noodles. Top with the thinly sliced scallion & ginger, and any other ingredients you choose.
What Can I Add To Udon Soup?
In theory, you can add whatever you like to udon soup. If you want to stick to traditional add-in ingredients, or are looking for inspiration, try any one of these:
- Roasted or sliced veggies like parsnips, sweet potato, or turnips
- Seaweed
- Furikake seasoning
- Soy sauce
- Chili oil
- Shichimi Togarashi
- A soft-boiled egg
- Woody herbs like rosemary and thyme
- Meat additions like chicken or beef
More Great Soups to Try
If you love this soup, you’ll love my other soup recipes, too.
Bone Broth Udon Soup Recipe
Print Recipe SaveIngredients
Bone Broth
- 4-6 chicken backbones chunks of beef bones, or leftover chicken/turkey whole cooked chicken bones
- 1 bulb fennel quartered
- 1 onion quartered
- 1 bay leaf
- 1 tbsp black peppercorns
- 3 inches fresh ginger sliced
- 1 head garlic cut in half
- 1 jalapeño
- water
Soup
- ~6 oz. frozen udon noodles per person
- 1 tsp grated fresh ginger
- 1 scallion thinly sliced
- salt & pepper
Instructions
Bone Broth (make in advance)
- Add all your ingredients to a stock pot. Cover with water.
- Bring to boil. Reduce to a light simmer. Cover. Cook 24-48 hours on lowest setting.
- Season with soy sauce to taste before serving!
Udon
- Heat your bone broth.
- Cook your udon noodles per the directions on the package.
- Pour 3 ladles of bone broth into a bowl with your udon noodles. Top with the scallion & ginger.
Excellent broth, so tasty and clean! I added one teaspoon of fish sauce and one teaspoon of sugar, and used fresh rice noodles. My daughter had the broth with udon noodles, and loved it. Thank you for this wonderful easy recipe.
I’m so glad you liked it, Kay! I’ll have to add the fish sauce/sugar addition… yum!
I think the fennel and bayleaf gave a different taste than the authentic Japanese udon. Because of those spices the udon tasted like some Indian recipe (which would’ve been good). I had to make it all over again without those spices for my udon noodles. Sigh…
Hi Alexandria,
I’m so sorry to hear you had to make it all over again! This is definitely NOT traditional Japanese udon, but instead, it’s a bone broth soup with udon noodles. Glad you thought it was still good, just not what you were looking for.
<3, Candice
Greetings from Ohio! I’m bored at work so I decided to check out your website on my iphone during lunch
break. I enjoy the information you present here and can’t wait to
take a look when I get home. I’m amazed at how fast your blog loaded on my cell phone ..
I’m not even using WIFI, just 3G .. Anyways,
good blog!
Greetings! Glad to hear you are enjoying it. Let me know if you give a recipe a try!