Liquid Nirvana: Slow-N-Easy Chicken Stock

Alrighty.  The other day we grabbed half an hour and created a light and lovely chicken broth. This weekend, when you’re lolling around in your pjs, sipping tea and reading the papers online, consider starting up a chicken stock. It’s stronger than broth, more flavorful, and will act as a beautiful flavor base for everything from soup to vegetables to meat sauces.  Chicken stock smells divine, extracts the nutrients from the bones and leftover meat and is a way of respectfully (and frugally) using the whole animal.  And it’ll make your kitchen smell like your grandmother’s.  Or, at least, like someone’s grandmother’s.

The recipe is simple: cover bones with water.  Simmer.  Wait.  Strain.  Refrigerate.  Next, I’ll walk you through it, and we’ll even talk about that hussy Anna Karenina…

The Slower and More Flavorful Way to Liquid Nirvana — Bone Broth:

A tip here:  Save your vegetable scraps.

By that I mean the onion skins, carrot tops and bottoms, parsley bits, garlic peels and other miasma you normally chuck into (hopefully) the compost bin or the garbage.  Just grab a big ziplock bag or a clean milk container and stuff ‘em in there every time you clean and chop your vegetables.  Store it in the front of the freezer, and just take the bag out every time you clean your leeks or smash your garlic or behead your parsnips.  This allows you to make stocks adn broths — including veggie broths — without any extra expenditure. Think of bone broth as a “kitchen sink” recipe, as in, “everything but.”  It’s a fabulous way to use up:

• forlorn veggies in the back of the bin
• onion skins, garlic skins, carrot tops _ parts you wouldn’t otherwise eat that still contain some flavor and/or nutrition
• tiny bits of meat from the bones
• cheese rinds
• bones from pork chops, Thanksgiving turkey and even roasts; you’re extracting their fine flavor and nutrition

First, enjoy your bird. Roast it, broil it, kung pao it; it don’t matter.  Rotisserie chicken works beautifully here if you don’t have the time or energy to cook your own.

Now, save the bones.  All of them.  Even the ones on other people’s plates. (No compunction about that: they’ll be sanitized in their Hades-hot bath soon enough.)  If you’re not making the stock now, stick the bones in an airtight bag in the freezer.

It’s best if the bones have a bit of meat still clinging to them.  If yours are super-clean, consider buying and throwing in a few chicken thighs.

If you cook it long enough, your stock will gel and become thick and luscious in the fridge.  But to ensure that happens – and to add more lusciousness — consider adding (yes) a chicken foot or two.

If you’re making beef broth, roast the raw bones for a bit until they’re nice and brown.  That brings out some of their flavor.

Now we plunk the bones into a stock pot.  Get ‘em in there nice and tight. I’ve read that the best stock pots are taller than they are wide, but a new stock pot’s out of my budget for now.  I garner great results from the same battered old stainless steel pot in which I boil my pasta water.

Next: cover the bones by about three inches of cold (filtered, if you have it) water. You want to keep the bones from floating around and bobbing up.  If one of them’s going rogue, just take a metal spatula or metal ladel and position it along the pan to weigh the bone back down into the water.

Keep the lid off.  We’re not steaming anything here; we’re concentrating flavor and want the water to cook down.

DO NOT ADD SALT. It’s OK if the skins or the chicken already has some salt or flavor, but you don’t want to salt the actual broth until the end, especially if you plan to cook it down and concentrate it.

If you’d like, you can add a dash of white or apple cider vinegar. This is supposed to help draw out more minerals from the bones, but I always forget to do this.

Bring it to a simmer, but don’t let it boil. Boiling makes the broth a bit cloudy, but as I’m not running to replace Thomas Keller or Michael Ruhlman as God of All Things Kitchen anytime soon, I don’t panic if the broth accidently goes ballistic.  Just turn it down ASAP.

You might see proteins (poetically termed as scum) coagulating at the surface during the first few minutes.  Feel free to skim that off with a ladel.  Or not.  It basically drains out later and doesn’t affect the taste, in my view.  But it will make your broth cloudy.

Turn the heat down to a low simmer. Keep it simmering, as you want some activity.  You want well-behaved bubbles. Medium-low usually does the trick here.

You’re basically done with the Active Cooking Time.  See how easy that was?

Now wait. A long, long time.  As in, go read Anna Karenina.  As in, you could start this broth after your chicken dinner and leave it on overnight.  Or on Sunday morning or at lunch and leave it til dinner.

Wait some more.

And some more.

By now, you’ve likely forgotten about the broth.  That’s cool.  Keep forgetting.  (Just make sure the heat’s not so high that you have no liquid left.)

Okay.  It’s been about 4 or 5 hours.  Cool.

We’re not done yet.  Unless we have to be.  I’d say minimum=4 hours.  I usually go 8-10.  Some go for 12 or even 24. At that point, though, it becomes less economical, as you’re paying for electricity or gas.

At the 2/3rds mark, (2/3rds into the time you plan on cooking this sucker) get your bag o’veggie scraps.  Or some fresh vegetables. Try to avoid veggies such as turnips or radishes, as they tend to impart an overpowering flavor.  Also eschew anything in the brassica (cabbage, broccoli, mustard greens) family, unless you like your chicken soup to taste like brussel sprouts.

Good veggies to use: carrots, anything in the allium family _ garlic, chives, onions, leeks.  Parsnips and other sweet root vegetables. There’s a lemon in this photo, but lemons aren’t so great for broth.  The rind from parmiggiano cheese, however, adds a lovely flavor.

Dump the scraps into the broth and push them down in with a ladel. (The water will have markedly decreased in volume since Vronsky and Anna started renting a palazzo in Italy.)

Keep it on a low simmer and let it go for another hour or two.

Ok, time to strain it.  Get a colander and a big bowl and strain it.  Push down on the veggies and bones to extract all the delicious golden liquid.  Your stock should smell heavenly by now.

I usually have about a quart by this time.  Sometimes I leave it at that.  That is just dandy: refrigerate your stock once it’s cool enough.  If you can’t stand the idea of consuming chicken fat, scrape it off the top of the gelled broth the next day.  I like the chicken fat: if it’s from a high-quality chicken, it’s good for me.  And it adds great mouthfeel and flavor.

Other times, I like to put the quart or so of strained liquid back into the (cleaned) pot and boil it down rapidly until I’ve got about a cup.  You must stand there and be nosy the whole time, because it’s quite easy to overdo it and say buh-bye to your lovely stock. But if you do it correctly, you’ll have a cup or so of highly concentrated stock that you can then cool and then spoon into ice cube trays which you then freeze.  That way, when you want to make soup or risotto or a sauce, you can just pop out a cube and add water.

You’re done!

You’ll notice the difference between this broth and the kind you buy in the box or can immediately, and I’m not just talking about the taste.  After you’ve cooled and refrigerated it, you’ll find you can cut through your broth with a knife.  It’s that thick and viscose. You’ve extracted all the minerals, gelatin, vitamins and other goodness from the bones and vegetables.  Once I started eating real broths and stocks, my hair grew shinier and my nails stopped breaking off.  I’m not saying the liquid gold was definitely the reason, as we all know about causation and causality, but either way, it’s truly wonderful stuff.

Enjoy!

P.S.  Oh – and to make a quick and delicious soup out of your lovely broth or stock: add some coconut milk (full-fat), shredded chicken, some of soy sauce or salt, a bit of romaine lettuce or spinach, rice noodles and heat (such as sriracha sauce).  Fast and unbeatable.

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Tagged as: chicken