Hi everyone! Welcome back to Le Gourmet TV. Today we are going to make Chicken Stock. And Chicken Stock in my kitchen is a base ingredient that I always have on hand and I think you use it in a lot of different recipes.
So, I start out very simply, I don't add a lot to my stock because today I really don't know where I am going to use this stock down the road. So, I don't make it too flavorful, I really want the flavor of the chicken. And that's just my own personal preference.
So you can add to your stock at the beginning whatever you want, I tend to just put in maybe one carrot that I cut up roughly, doesn't really have to be chopped too fine. This carrot will be discarded later. And I use a couple of onions and I just cut off the root end of the onion and then cut the onion in quarters.
And I leave the skin on. Again, this will be discarded at the end and the skin really adds a lot of color to the stock. And I am making a Brown Chicken Stock rather than a white stock.
And what that means is I am going to take the vegetables and the chicken parts and I am going to brown them in a hot oven for about an hour, hour-and-a-half. And what that does is it caramelizes the sugars and gives you a deep rich stock but also a flavor that's a little bit different from a white stock and you can't really use it in all of the same places, but it's great for soups and stews.
So two onions, roughly chopped, one carrot roughly chopped, and chicken parts. And what I tend to use for chicken parts are all of the little bits and trimmings and I save these up for over a month-and-a-half or two month period. Every time I do something with chicken thighs or chicken breasts, I will buy them, debone them and take the skin off. And then I throw those, I throw the trimmings in a bucket in the freezer and just save them up.
In this pan, I just have bones and skin and meat trimmings, just all sorts of parts and I just throw that into a large shallow roaster or any roaster that you can put in your oven. Just sort of lay them out and then throw my vegetables in on top. I put some pepper in here as well during the roasting.
So into the oven for an hour-and-a-half at 400 degrees and every 20 minutes or so I will just give it a stir to make sure that everything gets browned evenly. So you can smell in the kitchen, the roasting chicken, it smells fantastic.
And what we have got now in this pan is a lot of roasted bones and meat and skin. There is a fair bit of fat, but again, we can pull that off later after we have made the stock. And fat is flavor, so you don't want to take too much of it away early on. So now what we need to do is get all of that into this pot and I am sure it's not going to be pretty.
So, now what I want to do is deglaze this pan. There is a lot of brown fawned in this pan, lot of flavor. Cup-and-a-half of cold water poured into the pan, we will bring this up to temperature and just with a wooden spoon, we will scrape all the brown bits off and we will pour that it into the pot with the rest of the chicken bits.
So just like making gravy, you want to make sure you get all of the little bits that are stuck to the bottom of this pan, all of that brown, that fawned is an incredible amount of flavor that's going to go into the stock.
So, I think we have got it all up, we will turn this off. And then again, and I am sure there is no graceful way to do this. You just want to pour this and get it all into our stock pot. Great!
So, now into the stock pot you want to add just enough water to cover the bones. So that's got it and we will turn this on sort of medium, you don't want to bring it to a boil, you just want to bring it to a low simmer. We will put the lid on it and we will let it simmer for about an hour-and-a-half to two hours, fully extracting all of that flavor out of the bones and the other bits of chicken.
So, now what we have here is deep, intense, richly flavored chicken broth. Now this isn't something that you would use for any sort of delicately flavored dish. This is something for really rich flavored stews or to add to gravies when you are having a roast chicken or roast turkey even.
So, our next step is just to strain out the solids. I have got a fine mesh strainer over a clean stock pot and very carefully just strain out all of the big bits. So, now what you can do with this is if you really wanted to clarify it, you could take 5 or 6 egg whites, whip them into a soft peak state, put them into the broth, turn the heat on, bring it up to a boil and then form a raft and kind of scoop that off.
What I am going to use this for I don't need to clarify to that extent, so I am going to leave this stock as it is. I am going to refrigerate it overnight and scoop off all the grease and fat that will harden on top. Now you can take this and you can portion it out and freeze it, or you could portion it out and put it into mason jars and preserve it that way.
Personally, I use mason jars, it's shelf-stable, you don't have to refrigerate or freeze it and you can use it immediately, you don't have to wait for it to thaw. That's my preferred method. But you can do it anyway you want. Thanks for stopping by and I hope to see you again soon.
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