Rocket Bomber - article - recipes - Sunday Soups #3: Angry Birds.

oh, yeah: that subject line is total search bait – but look at these pics:

11 Days, two chickens, 10 quarts of chicken stock, six attempted recipes, numerous tweets & quite a few pictures, and of course the requisite ‘alien face hugger’ references –

Food blogging is *hard*.

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A crockpot makes chicken stock so easy I wonder why more people don’t try it. Of course, “stock” is one of those fancy-schmancy foodie words like artisinal, locavore, and arugula so maybe some are put off by the very name of the thing, and don’t attempt it. Maybe the idea of having to process a whole chicken is scary for those whose only interactions are with the sandwich, or perhaps with the boneless-skinless-types of chicken. Maybe the long cook time seems daunting, and home cooks balk at the perceived commitment.

Chicken stock is the easiest thing in the world — especially with a ready slow cooker on stand-by. But to say anything is ‘easy’ (in any context) depends on quite a bit of prior knowledge, practice, and familiarity — what I do as a matter of course might, to others, seem like alchemy.

So, to make chicken stock: take one chickens-worth of chicken bones and simmer with water and aromatics for a day, or so. Chicken stock is easy. Here:

Take 4 ribs of celery. Cut them in half (just enough to fit them in your crockpot)
2 carrots, washed, but don’t bother peeling them. Into the pot.
4 cloves of garlic. You have to peel them, but that’s it. Add them to the pot.
Half an onion. No, don’t dice it. It can go in whole.
One bay leaf, if you have it.

And chicken bones.

I’ll make this even easier – go buy a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. No, really, until you’ve turned KFC into a home cooked meal you’re going to think I’m joking: go buy a bucket of KFC (any recipe) and enjoy (hopefully not by yourself, and not all in one meal) but save the bones. You were going to throw them out; instead put them in a ziplock bag and freeze them. Do that again; one bucket of KFC might not be enough bones.

For everyone who just went “ew” – yeah, well, fast food can cause that reaction. Oh, I get it, “But people were eating that, gnawing on them, slobbering all over…” – yes. And I hope they enjoyed it. But here:

Bake the bones on a baking sheet in a 400° oven for a half hour: not only will this assuage any fears you might have about cooking table scraps, it opens up the bones and makes the water more effective as a solvent. After we add the bones and enough water to fill our crockpot within a half inch of the rim: we’re going to boil this for like, days – at least 12 hours at a low boil. You can add herbs, if you have them, and this will need some salt [season to taste] but those are the basics of stock: water, celery, carrot, garlic, onion, bones, heat, and time.

There are other ways to source chicken bones, of course. You can actually buy chicken necks & backs from some butcher shops quite inexpensively – after all the other useful parts are sold, these are about all that’s left. My preferred method is to buy a whole chicken, eat it, and save the bones and other odd bits to make stock – you can even cook the whole chicken in the crockpot, if you like, but stewed chicken tends to come out too dry; the long cooking time is not kind to breast meat. That, and dealing with a boiling hot, wet, dripping bird is asking for trouble.

One quick application for whole chicken is to either grill or broil it — the grill is preferred but the oven works just as well — and as shown in the pictures above, a chicken can be quickly and easily butterflied to shorten the overall cooking time and literally even out the difference between breast and thigh, meaning both will be done at the same time and with minimal finagling of either bird or fire.

My method for butterflied & roasted chicken is a barely-adapted version of Alton Brown’s: here’s an ‘official’ recipe posted to the Official website that no one will read and here’s the not-quite-official-or-legitimate youtube version we’re all going to watch:

I typically don’t get that fancy—at most I’ll rub the bird down with oil & then sprinkle some salt—but the basics are all there in the vid: how to prep the bird, and how to cook it. Alton immediately proceeds to a sauce — and I’m sure it’s tasty — but I’m more interested in the parts: Chicken, bones, grease, roasted veg.

The main advantage of the quick, hot broil is to de-fat the chicken: it drips out from under the skin and stays in the roasting pan. When I make stock from a bird cooked under the broiler, I never have to de-fat the resulting stock. (Since a slightly cloudy stock doesn’t matter to me either, I also don’t have to strain it through cheesecloth or anything fancy. I just fish the exhausted bones and veg out of the resultant stock with a wire spider)

After a half-hour rest on a baking sheet, your roasted bird will have cooled and is ready for a vulture-like picking over:

Remove and reserve both breasts [deboned], both thighs [deboned], and the meat from both chicken legs – deboned – have you caught up on the theme here? We’re removing all the succulent cooked meat from our bird in the largest chunks possible, and producing a small stack of ribs, cartilage, skin, and long bones for our stock. The backbone we snipped out and the neck (…both of which can be roasted with the bird; plenty of room in that pan) both join the picked-over carcass as they go into a slow cooker and we cook bones, celery, carrots, onions, and garlic on the low setting for 12 to 18 or even 24 hours. I also add the giblets; some folks balk at giblets, so your methods may vary. The wings are also Prime Additions to our stock, but I’ll forgive you if you eat them right out of the oven [save the bones!]

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So you’ve roasted the sacrificial bird. You’ve done as directed, and saved the carcass, and boiled it with herbs and saved the ceremonial broth:

Finished stock, once cooled, can be partitioned into plasticware and frozen. A 5qt. crockpot minus the solids will yield 3-4 quarts of stock; I like to freeze quart-sized containers for soups and other applications. What kinds of applications?

Well, if you get fancy and filter your stock so it’s clear, you can easily make eggdrop soup. You just need an egg or two, and some sliced green onion.

Gravies and sauces are also easy: stock or broth is often called for as an ingredient, and how nice would it be to have homemade on hand? No more cans or boxes — and you get to control the amount of salt that went into it.

Let me give you three soup “bases”, and some applications for each:

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A quick gravy

1 cup finely chopped onion
1 cup finely chopped mushrooms
optional garlic
2 tbs butter
2 tbs flour
1 cup chicken stock

1 can cream of mushroom soup*

1 cup reserved chicken*

In a skillet or saute pan: cook your mushrooms and onions in the butter over medium high heat until the onions are translucent and just starting to brown around the edges. Dust the flour over the top of your onion/mushroom mixture to form a quick roux; continue to cook over medium high heat until the flour just starts to brown (or at least long enough to cook the paste flavor out of it). Add a cup of stock and stir until the roux dissolves into a tasty sauce, and then add the cream of mushroom soup.

Now, that first asterisk* — you could double the amounts of mushrooms, start cooking the mushrooms a good five minutes in a dry skillet, or until they begin to give up liquid, add the onions and butter and cook as above, add another two tablespoons of butter, 4 total tablespoons of flour, cook into a roux, and then make a basic white sauce: some milk, some stock, a little garlic, plenty of time.

Do a recipe search for ‘bechamel’ and you’ll see where I’m going with that: you are of course forgiven if (like me) you take the red-and-white-labelled canned shortcut.

When I whipped up this quick gravy after roasting a chicken, I used the two thighs, diced, and stirred in. After a quick reduction to get to the right consistency, I served it on egg noodles for dinner. The next day I had chicken gravy over biscuits for lunch.

You could thin this out with even more chicken stock, to make a soup – but then, we had a can of cream of mushroom soup already, right? You could just throw some chicken in it. However, if you were going the long way ‘round and made your own bechamel, it might be kind of nice to go the distance and make your own cream of mushroom soup too.

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Cannellini & Orzo Soup

½ cup onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, crushed and minced
optional MORE GARLIC
optional ½ cup mushroom, diced – if you had some left over, say, from the gravy recipe above
optional tsp tomato paste – I have a tube of this in my fridge, so it’s easy to do small portions
optional strip of bacon, finely chopped
optional splash of soy sauce
1 can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
½ cup orzo pasta
2 quarts chicken stock

herbs if you have them: oregano, basil, parsley, a ½ tbs or so of each
Orzo is pasta cut to look like rice; you can of course use any pasta, but the shape and size of orzo goes well with the beans.

Let’s talk about all the options — First up: less is more. I tried to err on the side of hidden, subtle flavors. The idea is to go earthy and meaty, not full-on-smoky or salty or TOMATO. My most recent batches of chicken stock were made with roast chicken parts (especially the crispy, browned skin) and so came out a little bit browner, and tasting nice and roasty. I wanted to make a version of chicken noodle soup, while also accentuating that flavor of the stock.

In the bottom of the pan, I fried up one strip of bacon, very finely diced, with a little bit of chopped mushrooms until the bacon grease was rendered. To that I added the onion, cooked until translucent, and then mixed up a quick paste with just a bit of flour [a tsp. or less] and a tsp. of tomato paste. Once that came together, I added a splash of soy sauce and the beans, along with the garlic. I think I used four cloves of garlic in this one; your mileage may vary. I sort of tossed the beans around until they warmed up, then poured in the stock and brought it to a slow boil. After that, cook pasta as directed on the box, right in the soup.

It would be enough to make this with just onions, garlic, beans, and noodles — all my other additions could be skipped, or added singly, or in any combination. I just happened to have this on hand the night I was cooking.

It would also be possible to skip the pasta and add more beans, or to add spinach. Garnish with herbs, maybe also with a squeeze of fresh lemon.

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Chicken and Leeks

1 lb. leeks – see wikipedia if you’ve never heard of them before. Fresh leeks are a bit of a pain to clean, but manageable. I recently found frozen leeks—precut, ready to go—at Trader Joe’s.

1 half onion, Lyonnaise cut [see here]
Lots of garlic. Mmmm… garlic.
Butter. Lots of butter. Like, a half stick of butter.
2 tbs. flour

2 cups reserved chicken (or more)
Chicken stock

The easiest way to clean a leek is to cut it in half, lengthwise, and then run water down the middle to get the dirt out. In a way, it’s no worse than celery, but like celery the dirt really gets down in there so you have to take it apart to clean it properly.

Slice your leeks into ½in half-rings. Cook leeks, onions, garlic and butter in a skillet on medium heat until the leeks wilt and the onions are translucent. Dust the flour over the top and stir to combine, then loosen the mixture up with chicken stock, maybe just a cup to start.

Now, you have a choice: if this is going to be an entre, reduce slightly into a sauce, then serve over chicken torn into strips on a bed of egg noodles, pasta, or rice. Or even mashed potatoes: this would be awesome on mashed potatoes.

If we’re going to make Chicken & Leek Soup, we’ll want to use a little less chicken and a whole lot more stock — maybe even 3-4 quarts since we started with a pound of leeks. The great thing is you don’t have decide right away: The leek&onion mixture does fine in the fridge, so you could have a dinner one night and make soup (less soup) with the leftovers.

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These ideas are just the beginning. You could take a handful of frozen peas & carrots, a tiny bit of leftover chicken, this lovely homemade stock and make ramen noodles with it. Yes, that same brick that costs 17¢ — just use an actual soup base instead of the nasty little packet. Add a splash of soy if you miss the ‘ramen’ flavor. Stock is also a base for things like chicken pot pie, some chowders, and of course, chicken and dumplings. You can use chicken stock instead of water or milk in mashed potatoes [mmmm… for my next chicken & leek dinner, that’s what I’m doing], use it to make pan sauces for quick sauted meals, or even put boring noodles in it.