Saturday, January 17, 2015 – No, not investment stock. Stock, like, for soups and sauces. I made chicken stock last year. But it’s been almost a full year, so I figured I’d make some more. (It’d be especially useful for the chicken pot pie and the mole I’m planning on making later this year.)
So once again, I’m making chicken stock again. So I need chicken bones. Unfortunately, getting just plain old bones is tough to do. I stopped by Golden Steer, but they didn’t have any chicken bones. (Do they have any beef bones? I neglected to ask.) So I went to the supermarket to buy in bulk. So the supermarket had chicken thighs in bulk on sale, and I needed 4-5 lb in bones, so I decided to buy about 9 lbs of chicken bones, hoping to get somewhere around 50% in bone ratio.
That was a mistake. In retrospect, it’s kind of obvious, but chicken thighs have very low bone ratio. (On the flip side, they have very good meat ratio.) Out of 9 lbs, I only got about 1 lb 5 oz of bones. (I measured.) Next time, I should just buy a bunch of drumsticks (like I did last time), even if they are on sale. (On a completely unrelated note, I have about 8 lbs of chicken thighs that I can use for other cooking projects.)
The next decision I needed to make was whether I wanted to roast my bones and mirepoix to try to bring out the flavors. I decided yes, why not? So I did.
Otherwise, the recipe was the same as last time. Chicken bones. Mirepoix (onions, carrots, celery, garlic), herbs (parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, and a bay leaf), and salt and pepper. Simmer for 4 hours, strain, and reduce.
I started with 3 qts of water (because I didn’t want the stock to boil over this time, and so that the stock wouldn’t be as watered down this time), and ended up with 9.5 cups (a little under 2.5 qts). So I reduced it down to 1/4x and froze it in an ice cube tray in 1oz cubes.
(For those of you who don’t want to do the math, this means when you reconstitute, you get 1/2 cup of stock.)
So yeah. I started at around 7pm and finished at around 3am. About 1.5 of those hours was de-boning the chicken. About 1 of those hours was roasting everything. 4 hours was simmering stuff (during which I played a bunch of LoL). And about half an hour was reducing the stock. And this doesn’t add up, because there were a bunch of other small things, like chopping veggies, straining, loading ice cube trays, etc.
Yes, it’s a lot of work. Would I do it again? Well, last summer, when I was making soup and other appetizers for my family, I used canned stock from the supermarket, and the soup tasted a bit off. So yes, I would definitely make my own stock again.
Bonus: Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
