Mexican Chicken Lime Soup (Sopa de Lima)

Chicken, corn tortillas, avocados, lime. These are ingredients that simply love each other. Pretty much anything you make with them is bound to be good!

The following soup is a relatively easy version of “Sopa de Lima” or “Lime Soup”, a specialty of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.

It’s a chicken soup flavored with fiery habanero, cinnamon, clove, and tangy limes. The limes that are used in the Yucatan are a slightly different variety than what is easily available here, but standard Persian limes will work fine.

The soup is tangy from limes, smoothed with the buttery richness of avocados, and enjoys a little crunch from fried tortilla strips added for garnish.

It’s reminiscent of both pozole and tortilla soup, but with somewhat different spices and a strong hit of lime.

Mexican Chicken Lime Soup (Sopa de Lima) Recipe

We start by frying the tortilla strips so that you can use some of the tortilla infused oil in the preparation of the soup. If want to save time, you can fry the tortilla strips in a separate skillet while the soup is cooking instead of doing it ahead.

Habanero chiles are extremely hot. Handle them with care. Either wear gloves while prepping, or wash your hands thoroughly after handling and do not touch your eyes.

We've called for boneless thighs in this recipe. You could easily use whole bone-in thighs, for a deeper flavor from the bones, just cook a little longer and remove the meat from the bones to shred.

Ingredients

• 1 to 1 1/2 cups canola or corn oil for frying
• 6 corn tortillas
• 1 1/4 cup chopped white onion
• 3 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 habanero chile, seeded and minced
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• Pinch of ground cloves
• 1 pound tomatoes (2 large), cored, peeled, and chopped (or 1 cup of canned crushed tomatoes)
• 2 quarts of chicken stock (homemade is best)
• 1 teaspoon of dried oregano (preferably Mexican oregano if you have it)
• 1 teaspoon salt (more to taste)
• 1 1/2 pounds of skinless, boneless chicken thighs (or breasts if you prefer, we like the stronger taste of thighs), trimmed of excess fat, and cut in half crosswise
• 1/3 cup lime juice (from 2 to 4 limes, depending on the size)
• 1 bunch of cilantro, roughly chopped (stems included) for garnish
• 2 avocados, pitted, peeled, and roughly chopped for garnish

Read More: Mexican Chicken Lime Soup (Sopa de Lima)