Good stock is the most important element in French cooking. You can make great sauce by reducing a good veal stock to glaze. Pretty much everything tastes better if you cook with mellow chicken stock rather than water. Truffle stock enhances the flavor of vegetarian dishes. You can definitely buy stock in store, but there is a huge difference between store-bought and homemade stock that you make with caring attention for hours. And, today I want to show you how to make the most versatile stock, white chicken stock.
I am a strong believer of slow cooking. Of course, I like perfectly seared steak, but I love braised short rib much more. Fresh salads and fruits are good, but it cannot replace the warm filling from a bowl of hearty vegetable soup. There is something special about those foods. It could be the love from the cook who is skimming off the fat and paying attention to the braising short rib for several hours. It could be the cook's happy imagination of satisfied diner's face while he/she is stirring the soup for hours. There is no way you can cheat the flavor coming from the love poured into the foods.
On top of all the slowly cooked foods, there is the stock which needs to be cooked from an hour to as much as eighteen hours. If you are in a kitchen of a French restaurant, you always smell the fragrance of simmering stock. Onion, carrot, thyme, and all the aromatic ingredients are flowing with the steam and smoothly filling the whole kitchen. I just love the smell of simmering stock, which makes me imagine all sorts of delicious foods.
Do you want to know what the smell is? Then, please follow the recipe! :)
[Basic] White Chicken Stock (Fond de Volaille Blanc)
(Yield: 1 quart / Cooking time: 2.5 hour)
Ingredients:
+ 550g chicken bones
+ 1.5 liter cold water (~6 cups)
[Aromatic Ingredients]
+ 1/4 onion, peeled and roughly chopped (~50g)
+ 1/2 carrot, peeled and roughly chopped (~50g)
+ 2 scallion (white parts only), cleaned
[Herb Satchel*]
+ 1 garlic clove, slightly crushed with skin
+ a few sprigs of thyme
+ 1 bay leaf
+ 10 whole black pepper seeds
+ 2-3 parsley stems
+ 1 whole clove (small one)
* TIP: Make a small herb pocket with cheese cloth. To keep the herbs in the stock during the entire 2.5 hours of simmering, it is convenient to have a herb satchel. If you don't make herb satchel, and just add the herbs in the stock, you might skim off the herbs together with impurities on the top of simmering stock.
Procedures:
1. Remove and discard skin and fat as much as possible from the chicken bones, and clean under running cold water.
Where you can find chicken carcass? I am not sure if you can buy chicken carcass, but you can buy a whole chicken and butcher it to chicken breasts, thighs, legs and the wings. Now you have chicken carcass! :)
2. Place chicken bones into a stock pot and pour 1.5 liter of cold water.
3. Bring to the boil and lower the heat immediately to low and simmer for about 15 minutes. Skim off the foam and fat as much as possible. The foam is impurity which will make the stock cloudy.
You can see rising foams.
Skim off the foams as much as possible.
4. Add all the aromatic ingredients & herbs and continue to simmer over low heat for two hours. Skim off the fat and any rising impurities every 15-20 minutes.
Before simmering
After two hours
5. Strain the stock through really fine strainer carefully.
I usually remove chicken bones and big chunks of vegetables before straining the stock. This makes the pot much lighter and easier to handle.
Use the finest strainer possible.
6. Cool down in an ice bath immediately. Stirring while it is cooling in ice bath makes the stock cool much faster.
7. Divide the cooled stock into containers. If you don't plan to use the stock within a few days, you can refrigerate it in small batches.
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