The basis for a lot of my cooking is a great stock, and store-bought stocks are not great. They can be okay for a few things, like cooking rice, but overall I don't love them. So I make my own stock often. There is no time when I don't have my homemade stock in the refrigerator.
Stocks have two major culinary components: flavor and body. "Body" means the protein content, and the only way for a layperson to discover this is to chill the stock. If a chilled stock turns to Jell-O, it's got a lot of protein in it - AKA gelatin. The gelatin comes from three major components, and potentially a fourth: skin, bones, and tendons/ligaments. The potential fourth source is commercially prepared gelatin that you add to your stock.
There's nothing wrong with adding commercial gelatin to your stock. Gelatin is gelatin, whether it comes from the stuff you're boiling or a packet. If you follow my recipe, it's not necessary. But you can add it if you want. The body/gelatin in a stock is critical to certain recipes, though, so you absolutely need it in a stock, no matter how it gets in there.
Why body? Stock is major ingredient in many preparations, and the two most common are soups and sauces. A stock with a lot of body/gelatin contributes a smooth mouthfeel to soups. It means sauces need fewer additives to thicken (additives being things like a cornstarch slurry). Body is at least 50% of the reason to make a stock in the first place. Without body, you may as well just use a bouillon cube.
But what about the other 50% of the stock? The flavor? Flavor might be even more important than body in a stock. I prefer assertively flavored stocks, but a correctly-made stock is a bit of an enigma. It should have a good flavor, but that flavor, despite any assertiveness, should be subtle in the finished dish. It's like a framework, upon which you can build additional flavors. The flavor gets out of the way when necessary, but is supportive for other flavors.
Flavor comes primarily from the flesh of the animal. The skin is critical to flavor, so it does double-duty because it also contributes to the stock's body. Because of this, you should treat the skin as the most important part of the stock. Flavor additionally comes from the vegetables you'll add to the stock. The vegetables you add are important, so you'll roast them as well, because heat brings out their flavor too. But equally important are the vegetables you don't add. More on this in a bit.
I personally don't freeze my stock, although it's entirely do-able. Main reason: my stocks are kept sanitized through the production process (which isn't that complicated), and so they last for a month in the 'fridge. No question I'll use what I produce before it goes bad. But your cooking is your cooking, so you go ahead and freeze it if you like.
Here's the recipe.
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Put 2 or 3 pounds of raw chicken on a Silpat-lined baking sheet.
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Put a halved onion, half a head of celery, and 4 large carrots in a nonstick, ovenproof pan. If your roasting pan is large enough, you can roast the chicken and veg together.
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Lightly dust everything with salt and pepper, and let it sit on the counter for an hour.
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Roast everything at 300 degrees for 8 hours. The chicken should be deeply brown and the vegetables should be wilted and starting to show brownness too. If there is liquid in the baking sheet or pan, roast until the liquid has reduced to a near-solid. Be sure that you can recognize moisture vs. fat - there will be a lot of fat rendering from the chicken, and that's a good thing. You want near-zero moisture, but fat is fine.
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Yank everything out of the oven and let it sit for at least an hour on the counter. Remove 75% of the chicken meat and skin, and reserve for later use.
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Put everything but the reserved chicken meat into an ovenproof stock pot. Scrape the Silpat into the stock pot, including every bit of fat. Hell, add the Silpat itself to the stock pot. Cover everything in the pot with water. The water should be 1-2 inches above anything else in the pot.
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Bake the stock pot, uncovered, at 250 degrees for 5 hours. Adjust the water content so that everything is again covered by 1-2 inches, cover the pot, and bake for another 5 hours.
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Let the pot sit in the oven for 24 hours. Do not open the oven or uncover that pot during this time. The pot at this point is sterile, and it will remain so unless you mess it up. Eat safely.
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Bring a burner to high, put the pot on the burner, and bring to a simmer. Let it simmer for 30 minutes, covered.
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Turn off the burner, wait another 30 minutes, and strain the stock into containers.
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Return the solids to the stock pot, cover with water, put the lid on the pot, and simmer for another 30 minutes. Strain the stock again. This step extracts every last bit of usable liquid from the solids.
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Immediately refrigerate the stock. It will last for a month in the refrigerator. After chilling, the stock will be capped with snow-white chicken fat, which can be carefully extracted with a spoon and used for all sorts of things that may or may not involve the stock itself.
The recipe breakdown: Start with raw chicken. You can use a whole chicken if you like, but I get equally great results from legs, wings, or breasts. Often grocery store sales dictate which chicken parts I use. But the key is: the raw chicken MUST include substantial portions of skin, bones, and meat. No boneless, skinless chicken breasts here. Leave out any liver - it can make your stock bitter, just like burned garlic.
Put a Silpat on a baking tray, and arrange your chicken on the Silpat. Make the arrangement as flat as possible, to ensure even cooking. If you're using a whole chicken, spatchcock it. Contact between the chicken and the Silpat is mandatory. What we're after is Maillard browning. Do what you can do get the chicken as brown as possible. Flip the chicken after a few hours of roasting with tongs if you think it will get you better browning (I usually do this).
Direct contact with a hot surface, which the Silpat will eventually be, promotes browning. Dust the chicken with salt and pepper. Only a light dusting. You can adjust for salt content later when you're making your sauce, soup, or whatever. Salt is necessary to draw moisture and other liquids to the surface of the chicken prior to roasting. The heat of the roasting will dehydrate the chicken and further draw all sorts of cool liquids to the surface. These liquids will be attacked by the oven's heat, essentially baking it into the skin. This promotes browning, which in turn greatly adds to the stock's flavor. The moisture itself will evaporate within the first hour or two of roasting, so you can ignore any advice that tells you to not salt the chicken. We're roasting primarily for stock here, not because we want to eat the chicken's meat - although we can do that too.
We're going to roast this chicken beyond anything that's reasonable for eating. Brown, brown, brown. Wrinkly, dehydrated, barely edible...that's what we're after. There will be a lot of rendered fat on the baking sheet. You might see some burning. SOME burning is okay, but the key is to get that chicken brown. After cooling the roasted chicken, the skin should be delicate. It should actually shatter if it's at room temperature, and should have an intense chicken flavor.
During roasting, you don't need to check on the chicken that often. Once every hour or two. You're roasting at a relatively low temperature, so burning the chicken would take a couple days.
When the roast is finished, you need to bring the chicken to room temperature in order to handle it comfortably. Strip out 75% of the flesh and skin. The remaining flesh and skin (and veg) is critical to the flavor of the stock. Go ahead and use it all if you want - but there is a point of diminishing returns.
The flesh you've reserved will be quite dry, and that's why I prefer to use wings, legs, or thighs for stock, because these chicken parts retain moisture better. Actually, it's not moisture but fat - but your mouth tells you it's moisture. You'll end up with a Ziplock full of dry-ish chicken bits. They'll be useful, but you're stacking the deck in your favor if you start with fatty chicken flesh. When you use then in a future preparation, make sure to add extra fat and moisture, or you'll be eating chicken with the texture of chalk. This chicken is ideal for soups, nachos, mac 'n cheese, dog food, etc. Dishes where the chicken isn't really the star, but where it acts as a protein injection. The remaining 25% of the flesh will be wholly adequate when it comes to flavoring your stock.
As to the veg, you'll want to kinda sorta treat them the same as the chicken. Roast them until they, too, are brownish. There should be little-to-no liquid in the pan when the roast is complete. But they should not be burned. Use only onion, celery, and carrot to start. Unless you burn them, these vegetables will be relatively neutral in flavor. Don't believe me? Toss a head of garlic into the mix - you get the slightest amount of char on garlic and it's gonna make your stock inedibly bitter. Other safe vegetables include parsley, leek, turnip, potato, radish...but why risk it? These vegetables add little flavor. Avoid herbs at this stage. Make your stock flavorful but neutral. You can add rosemary or basil or epazote when you're using your stock for your final preparation.
Staging the stock bits at room temperature (STP) is important. First, you salt the raw chicken and let it sit at STP. This draws moisture to the surface, which you will then bake into the chicken's skin, which promotes flavor. Then you need the chicken at STP in order to remove the majority of the flesh, because hot chicken hurts your hands when you handle it. After baking for a bazillion hours, the stock needs to rest for another bazillion hours in a sealed oven. STP is nothing in terms of food safety when it comes to cooked chicken, as long as the chicken remains sealed in an oven and with the lid on (e.g. it's sterile until you break the seal). And after you break the seal, you will immediately bring the stock pot to a simmer and strain it into containers, and then you'll chill it. This is a safe recipe.
And that's it. Roast the chicken and veg. Pick out the chicken meat. Stick the remaining chicken bits and veg into a stock pot with water and bake forever. Strain and refrigerate. You'll end up with a stock of the gods, which can be used for all sorts of sauces or soups or other recipes. Freeze it if you feel like. Keep the salt content to a minimum.
Brown is where the flavor is. You can use a similar approach to beef, pork, and veal stocks.
Submitted March 05, 2017 at 10:40PM by it_was_you_fredo http://ift.tt/2mbcRl8 Cooking
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