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barton cole :: veni, vedi, vero scripsi
 Saturday, February 14, 2009
Okay, chicken broth.
The other day, I wrote about beef broth, jus de beouf, one of the foundations in the French (thus, any appropriate) kitchen.[1]
I went on at great length to describe the procedure; if one were to look it up in The Joy of Cooking (a favorite, handy reference - but use the old edition - you can check by looking in the index for possum recipes, which the old one has, but has been edited out of the recent edition - why?), no doubt the recipe would occupy less space on the page than a realtor's ad - but I took the Escoffier-on-absinthe route, and wrote and wrote about it, like I'm doing here, only in this case, I'm writing about something else.
Entirely.
As I mentioned at the close of my gasbag essay on jus de beouf, making chicken stock is a whole different ballgame, and it is.
It's another of the fundamentals in a French kitchen, but rather than being called, "jus de poule," it's known as fond blanc. "The white foundation."
Chicken stock, fond blanc, is the basis for a family of sauces, just as jus de beouf is the parent of families of sauce.
From chicken stock, one can deviate into veloutes (basically, gravy), not to mention a host of soups, sauces, and other perfect contributions to a wide variety of dishes. Cooking rice in chicken stock. Chicken stock in a pan of fresh, sautéed spinach, with a beaten egg swirled in it, and a slice or two of radish, to make a simple spring soup…
Chicken stock, in that archetypal kitchen, is a staple. One must always have it on hand.
By my own reckoning, I believe I have an unending string of chicken stock stretching back about fifteen years; I have not run out in all that time. I've come close, but always make a bit in time, and add the old stuff to it, and always have, so there are always a few molecules of that vintage chicken stock in everything I prepare.
Once, I lived up the road from a store that had, I discovered, chicken backs-and-necks for nineteen cents a pound. This beat the price I was currently paying wholesale, forty-nine cents a pound for a fifty pound box, which was what we were using to make chicken broth in the restaurant.
So I would get off the bus on the way home from work, and clean them out and buy all the backs and necks they had; usually, I went home with about twenty pounds a week.
Sacré bleu! That's a lot of chicken stock!
You're not kidding, but on top of that, this store also sold oxtails (beef) for forty-nine cents a pound, and they make the best broth you can imagine, so I was cleaning them out of those, too.
I constantly had broth on the stove (this was in the days when I was a bachelor and had a tap room with a refrigerator full of home-made ale on tap), much more than I was able to use.
What to do?
Well, I make a couple of gallons of stock at a time, so I reduce it until it's thick and down to about two quarts. Then, when using it, I likely will have to "reconstitute" it.
But in the case of way too many gallons of broth, I kept going - I boiled it until it was reduced and thick - about two gallons reduced to a quart - which was like deep miners drilling to the edge of the rocky mantle - and kept going.
I had the heat on low, as low as possible, since the stuff was so thick and syrupy that it would easily boil over. When it was so thick it was in peril of being scorched, I poured it into a pie plate, where it made a layer about 1/8" thick. It rapidly set up, gelatinous, and within a day, was a solid, barely pliable sheet which I could peel up from the plate. I cut this into strips and packed them in jars of kosher salt, where they became like dark, brittle toothpicks of broth.
I've used them for boiling up a batch of soup when hiking in the mountains - my goal, being, always, to eat better on my old Optimus stove in the mountains that the rest of the folks are eating down on the shore. I've added them to terrine de viande (you might think it's like meatloaf). All-purpose, and a way to satisfy my broth-junkie behavior.
My wife claims that I pray over the stock pot, and that calls up a nice image, and one that's close, I suppose, to how I feel about broth, and my role in conjuring it.
However, she's misquoting me, having heard me say, "Making stock is how I pray."
That's exactly true. It's a devotional activity, and connects me to the lifeline of the kitchen, and to the lineage of what I intend to do when I'm there.
Beef stock makes much of roasting everything to get a deep flavor, and a deep, brown color, but chicken stock goes the other way - fond blanc. So the emphasis is on flavor without saturating the color.
Chicken stock the way I make it
I generally make a batch of chicken stock when the freezer is at its limit of how many chicken carcasses it will hold. I always buy chickens whole, and take them apart, using the hindquarters for this, the breasts for that, and saving the back, the neck, and often the wings, wrapped up in plastic in the freezer.
When I have three or four of these, it's time to make stock.
Out comes the pot, filled with water, about three gallons. In go the carcasses - nothing cycles through the oven at all. The emphasis is on flavor without color, so I won't even save bones from a roasted chicken for the stock pot (I'll send them, ad hoc, into some other soup application).
I bring the pot to the boil and turn it to a gentle simmer - now is the time to being clarifying the stock. Much scum gets thrown off at first - in fact, it's also customary to bring it to a boil and discard that first pot of water, taking all the scum with it - but I don't want to lose that flavor, so I skim, and run a little, fine sieve across the top, scooping scum along the way.
After I've taken out as many of the impurities as I can, I begin adding the vegetables.
I'm quite specific about what goes in, nearly as if sorting clothes into different piles to wash them.
I'll add onions, but not the peel, and celery, but no carrots. Too much color; makes the broth look like it has jaundice - for that matter, no onion skins, either, under any circumstances - even if someone has a gun to your head No broccoli stems, or any other vegetable scraps - not even turnips, which some misguided afficionados suggest. This is liturgy, as much as a sacred text.
Get some garlic in there; crush it with the flat of your knife. Scallions are great, and leek greens, but go easy - you'll make your stock green. The onion flavor hides nicely in the background. A lovage leaf maybe, but go easy. That stuff's potent. And of course, parsley.
So get the bones simmering and skimmed, and get the vegetables (the onions and celery) in there simmering, too.
Add a bay leaf, and a boquet garni isn't a bad idea - this is a little bundle of thyme and chervil and parsley in a short cylinder of celery stalks, tied in a bundle. A few peppercorns, and as with beef stock, add a bit of salt, but use a gentle hand; you might want to severely reduce the broth, and don't want it to end up too salty.
You need to let this simmer for six to eight hours, but I'll often let it go about twelve, letting it simmer overnight; stir it every hour or so. You can skim off the fat, since there will be a lot, but it's also handy to save it, pulling it off the cooled stock later.
I don't bother to top the pot up as it simmers, but let the level go down, since it won't be on the stove that long, and I want it thick and concentrated.
In the morning, not long before pulling it off the stove, I'll throw in a leaf or two of sage, and stir it up.
When it's all done, put it through the finest strainer you have.
Here's the same procedure as described in on making beef stock: And I pour it, when it's all done, through a fine strainer, fresh off the boil, into clean, quart mason jars, and screw the lids on right away (be careful to wipe the rim if you mess it up, but be clean about it). I label the lid with the date on masking tape and stick it in the refrigerator right away; although you won't find this recommended in a USDA pamphlet, and should hold me blameless if you use my method, I have never had broth rot if bottled this way and kept in the refrigerator. I have kept broth for over a year this way, and no spoilage.
However, as soon as you open that bottle to use some broth, which should be nice and congealed, too, if you had favorable bones, it will begin to spoil. Once I open a bottle of it, I either use it within three days, or bring it to a boil and put it in a clean, smaller jar and put it away promptly. Keeps indefinitely, again.
You can open the bottles after they've chilled to take off the layer of fat - this is how stocks are routinely defatted, by chilling them and lifting off the congealed fat from the surface - but it contributes to the air seal, so don't worry about it until you're ready to use it.
I have seen many references that suggest the easiest way to store broth is to freeze it in ice-cube trays, and keep them in a bag, but the freezer is the worst place to store stock, as it's a harsh-flavor environment - nothing emerges from the freezer with its flavor intact, and in the case of this rather robust, but really demure and gentle beef broth, you don't want to treat it that way. Keep it in jars, fresh, in the refrigerator, and be sure to pasteurize it if you open it. I didn't mention what I do with the discards; in the case of the beef stock, I took a few of the shin bones over to a dog friend, and absolutely made his day. The rest went out to the crows.
I routinely dump everything from the chicken stock pot out for the crows; they take everything away. I'm not patient enough to pick through the meaty stuff and fish it out for use in soup; besides, the goal was to extract the flavor from it, so it's not much worth saving. Give it to the crows.
If you don't have crows, maybe you keep pigs? I'm sure they would love the stuff. Failing that option, I don't know what you'd do.
When I make a new batch of stock, I add the old stuff to it, during the reducing stage.
And I always have it; of course, everyone knows about how well chicken broth works as a medicinal, and here's how you do it:
Add a spoonful of concentrated broth to a cup of broth, and simmer it with a hearty amount of salt - up to a half teaspoon - and a couple of cloves of minced garlic. Simmer for about ten minutes, and then off the stove and into a jar, or into a mug for the invalid.
[1]I'm not arguing that only French food must be prepared, but the kitchen benefits from being managed in the French manner.
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