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complaisant2u -> RE: Learning to cook? (6/21/2007 10:56:06 AM)
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Didn't really want to back to back my posts, but I might forget if I don't.
Chicken stock is used a lot in cooking. It's good to add to white rice for flavor and a lot of other things that ask for water could use chicken stock to add "body" to the flavor of the dish. Unfortunately the stock in the grocery store all seems to be really salty. Sams has a commercial brand, Tomes, I think thats good, but it's a big jar that takes a long time to use.
To make chicken stock, take the letover bones from a raw chicken. Don't use backbone because it's a pain to get out later because it tends to break up into little vertebre. If you get a pack of breasts, and you debone them, you'll have a bunch of bones with attached meat. You can make stock out of that. Same with a whole chicken if you cut the breasts off, debone them, take the legs and wings off, even then you have a bunch of bones and bits of meat. This is what you make stock out of (minus organ meat).
Put it all in a stock pot (usually just a taller pot), cover it with some COLD water. If you use hot water, the stock will be cloudy, which is fine to eat, just not as pretty. Added to this is carrots, celery, and onion. Stocks can be made totally from scrap. That means you can add what you trim off the celery and it's base, the ends of carrots and peelings, and the ends and peelings from onions. It can be non scrap too of course. Salt is the final ingredient. I use Kosher salt because it's coarse.
With the chicken, water, celery, onion, carrots, and salt, bring the stock to a boil, reduce heat to simmer, stir some and let cook for a while. How long? I dunno, maybe an hour. The idea is to leach the chicken flavor out of the bones. After it's cooked for about 15 minutes it should definatley be safe enough to taste, so just keep tasting it. If it never gets a good chicken flavor, you have too much water or not enough chicken and bones. You don't want to cook it for hours and hours, the bones will disentigrate. So after an hour, just take it off.
Take a collendar, preferabley a sieve and pour through draining the liquid iinto another container. The idea being you want to filter out all the chicken meat, bones, carrots, onions and celery. If your broth isn't quite chicken flavored enough, you can cook just the broth longer. That's called reducing.. by evaoprating the water, you're left with all the stuff that gives it the flavor, so gradually the flavor gets stronger. Or you can cheat and add some bouluon. If you added the right amount of everything, it'll be fine. Bear in mind that you might be used to tasting heavyly salted stock and if you think this stock tastes like that it wont. You can put a little of the stock into a bowl and add more salt and taste to see if it actually does. But the idea is to keep the stock less salty and healtier.
Sometimes the stock will have a bunch of grease on top from the fat. There are tools to strain this off, or you can just use a ladle or big spoon to skim it off. Also fat congeals when cold. You can refridgerate the stock and the grease on top will congeal so you can scoop it off easy.
Now that you got stock, you could throw in a bag of soup veggies and rice and have chicken vegetable and rice soup.
To keep the stock, you can freeze it in containers or can it if you're old guard i mean school.
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