Chicken soup with noodles (no more Parmesan croutons!)
“Start with a good stock.”
This instruction was the gist of the lesson on stocks and soups. Soups are relatively easy to make, after all — you toss a bunch of stuff such as protein, produce, and pasta in a big pot and you heat it all up. But you only get out of that pot what you put in it; if you use a good homemade stock with well-chosen quality ingredients, you’re likely to get a very good soup.
So, what is stock, anyway? It’s not broth — it’s much richer and, in the case of veal or beef stock, considerably thicker than broth — the veal stock Hong showed us was the consistency of gelatin, a natural result from the slow cooking of a lot of bones. Also, stock does not come in a packet or a cube. It may come in a can, I suppose, but I’ve never seen a can of real stock, only cans of chicken or beef broth claiming to be stock. (I’m sure “broth” isn’t the right word for what might be found in many of these cans . . .)
Making stock
Stock is the soup base, the heart of the soup. But it’s often not a just-throw-it-in ingredient. It’s an ingredient best prepared in advance—the recipe before the recipe. Here are the basic techniques:
To make chicken stock: Rinse five pounds of chicken bones under cold water and trim any excess fat. Put bones in large stockpot; add just enough water to cover the bones. Bring to a simmer. Skim any scum that rises to the surface. Add big chunks of onion, carrot, and celery, and bouquet garni and continue to barely simmer for up to three hours, removing the scum every so often. Strain, cool quickly (in an ice bath if you can manage it), then refrigerate or freeze.
To make veal stock: Wash and dry eight pounds or so of veal breast and shanks. Brown in 400° F oven. Place in large stockpot. Deglaze roasting pan with water and white wine, add this liquid to stockpot. Add just enough cold water to cover the bones by one inch. Bring to a simmer. Skim any scum that rises to the surface. Add big chunks of onion, carrot, and celery, and bouquet garni, and continue to barely simmer for up to 24 hours, or at least nine hours, removing scum occasionally. Strain, cool at room temperature, then refrigerate or freeze.
To make fish stock: Wash about five heads and frames (eyeballs OK, gills not so much) from white, non-oily fish. Place in large stockpot; add just enough cold water to cover the bones. Add some white wine. Bring to a simmer. Skim any scum that rises to the surface. Add finely chopped onion and carrot, coarsely chopped mushroom, and bouquet garni and continue to barely simmer for 30 minutes. Strain.
To make vegetable stock: Put chunks of most any vegetables you desire in a large stockpot; add just enough cold water to cover. Simmer for 30 minutes. Strain. You can, of course, eat the simmered vegetables!
You may have noticed that none of these stock techniques called for seasoning other than the bouquet garni and whatever flavors would come from the bones and vegetables. You don’t season stock—you season the soup or whatever you’re making from your stock — gravy, perhaps. And, though I hate to admit it, you’re gonna have to add more than a little salt, “the secret ingredient,” according to Hong. “Adding salt and pepper to your soup will round out the flavor profile. If you don’t add enough salt, you will just taste chicken” or whatever the main ingredient is.
From stock to soup
If this week’s recipes are representative of the wonderful world of soups, then chicken stock is by far the most widely used stock for soups. We made delicious renditions of southwest squash soup with ancho cream (ancho is a dried poblano chile, according to Wikipedia), fennel corn chowder, chicken soup with noodles and Parmesan croutons, and pappa al pomodoro (bread and tomato soup) from the chicken stock. There was a full-bodied onion soup au gratin made from beef or veal stock, but chicken stock would have been OK for that, too.
Gary and I have already started to buy whole chickens, cutting them into parts for meals, and freezing the carcasses. A four-pound chicken, we found, yields about one pound of freezable bones (not including leg, thigh, and wing bones). One down, four more to go before we can make our own chicken stock.
Salad afterthoughts
The class also made a couple of salads: mixed greens with chicken, shrimp, and basil dressing, and salade nicoise.
I first heard of salade nicoise about two years ago while viewing disc 1 of The French Chef DVD set. (I cannot post a video for you, but you can find Child’s recipe here.) I liked that the recipe could be easily made into lighter fare, and that you could add or subtract whatever you wanted from the recipe; the fun part was you can be creative in the way you arranged the salad on the serving platter. Other than that, I didn’t consider nicoise any special kind of salad.
But because you arrange salad nicoise on a platter or individual plate instead of tossing it all together, it is a special kind of salad — a composed salad. (I learned about composed salads from Alice Waters in The Art of Simple Food.) And Hong did continuously refer to this salad as a composed salad. Believing that the salad components were to be artfully arranged on a platter lined with Bibb leaves, I carefully cut some boiled potatos into wedges, and directed Gary to halve his hard-boiled eggs carefully. Each group of vegetables or proteins was to be tossed separately before it was added to the platter, or so our recipe stated. Imagine my surprise when Hong instructed us to dump our tomatoes, onions, pepper, radishes, green beans, celery, anchovies, and beautifully sliced eggs and potatoes into one large bowl, to be tossed together with dressing. How anti-climatic. So much for the composed concept. Ah, well, I guess class time was running out by the time we got to the salads and the “dump, toss, and dress” technique was the most time efficient. We needed time to sit down and enjoy our luscious soups, after all!