Mark Siddall, October 27, 2020
Chicken stock is where the culinary arts meet the dark arts. Stock-making is the sole remaining prefecture of an ancient and occult science. Alchemy is now derided for having sought to convert base metals like lead and tin into gold or silver. Alchemy’s successor, Chemistry, didn’t manage that either. It took nuclear physics. An accidental (not to be confused with accident) outcome at a Soviet nuclear facility in Siberia turned the shielding of a reactor from lead into gold without the benefit of a Philosophers’ Stone.
The medieval practise of alchemy was not solely about metals. Equally compelling was the search for a universal elixir. This search has a very deep history. In his twilight years, having already lost Enikdu, Gilgamesh sought an elixir of life. Mithridates, ever-fearful of assassination by poison, firmly believed he’d be protected from death by a homeopathic concoction of diluted toxins. Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huan was so convinced of mercury as an elixir for eternal life that he took a little every day. He died aged 49… of mercury poisoning, of course.
The elixir of life is Chicken Stock.
I do believe I could be happy making variations of chicken stock every single day for the rest of my life – were there a job in that. There is more variation to be had in chicken stock than almost any other culinary endeavor. Few other things in a kitchen allow so much opportunity to build depths of flavor, fragrance, texture and character.
Chicken stock is the stuff of memory, of longing, and of yearning. It is capable of invoking with a single sip what only the Brazilians have encapsulated in a single word: saudade. And it is a front line defence against upper respiratory tract infections.
Artie’s Deli ( ז”ל ) touted its matzo ball chicken soup as the “Penicillin of the Upper West Side.” They weren’t wrong. Chicken stock is, in fact, just such an elixir. Bear with me.
The world is reeling under the stresses of SARS CoV 2. Hope for a vaccine is complicated by the fact that many of those most at-risk might have to be vaccinated multiple times a year to keep up their immunity. There’s no precedent for that. Chicken stock is no substitute for a solid neutralizing-antibody-inducing vaccine. However, hot chicken stock has been keeping people healthy for millennia due to several inherent properties.
The properties of chicken stock to which upper respiratory tract (URT) infections are refractory, are well known. Part of what allows colds (rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, and coronaviruses) to establish in the nose, mouth and back of the throat (i.e., nasopharyngeal region) are temperature and humidity. Another is osmotic tension – salt. Gargling with intolerably salty water remains a terrific (however imperfect) defence against strep-throat and other throat infections.
Under normal Autumn to Spring circumstances, the breathing and eating spaces inside of your head are profoundly lower in temperature and humidity than deep in your lungs. A lot of these viruses are happier under those circumstances. We need to make those viruses unhappy.
Is Chicken Stock a Panacea for the Pandemic?
Of course not, but, like other coronaviruses, SARS CoV 2 really doesn’t like high humidity and heat. Nor does it like desiccation and freezing. It’s ill-advised to desiccate and freeze your throat, but it’s awfully easy to punch up the heat and humidity and the osmolarity (salt). How? By spending a lot of time with bowls and mugs of chicken stock.
Regular engagements with hot chicken stock in winter months are inhibitory to URT infections not only for physical and chemical reasons but for physiological reasons too. We tend to drink less in the winter because we’re not over-exerted or overheated. Yet chronic dehydration compromises our immune responses. Chicken stock reverses dehydration.
Chicken stock, which by definition results from a non-destructive low-heat extractive process, can arrive to the table or patient, if properly managed, with hefty doses of uncompromised-by-heat vitamins, minerals, electrolytes, and protein, all on top of basic hydration.
Chicken stock also usually arrives with love and affection. Something many have lost touch with during this interminable pandemic.
Seriously, there are few down sides to asking everyone to make chicken stock from scratch and include it it their diet 2 or 3 times a week. Making chicken stock reduces waste (the bones and scraps after eating a chicken). It leverages an animal with a very high feed conversion rate, and thus a low-ish carbon footprint. Sure… cricket stock might have a lower carbon footprint, but I don’t recommend it. Yes, I tried.
Chicken stock is a great intellectual leveller too. Disagreements about whether various spices have nutritional and disease-fighting benefits can be put aside because they belong in chicken stock regardless. If they are miracle cures… great, put them in. If they are not, fine.. put them in anyway for aroma and character.
There is no shorting this stock
The basics are easy: water, leftover chicken carcass, heat and time. The water equation is easy: 1 quart for 1 chicken. Everything else needs a caveat.
The chicken:
You can, of course, make a stock by throwing a raw chicken and aromatics in a pot of water for an hour. After all, this is the core of cooking Korean ginseng Samgyetang. However, for depth of flavor, nothing beats roasting.
It’s not stock if there are no bones from which to extract connective tissue proteins that will give stock its unctuous mouth feel. Just broth. But it’s also not much of a stock if it’s just bones and no meat. What you really want is meat attached to bone because those attachments are made of collagen and elastin. And those connective tissue proteins are what make stock transcendently awesome.
Take chicken backs, wings, necks and feet (but not livers), or just the remains of Sunday chicken dinner, and roast them off for half an hour at 350 F. This can be transformative to the depth of flavor in a stock. In addition to any Maillard reaction, the heat is “cracking” and denaturing the proteins, the fats and connective tissues in a way that makes them more soluble in the stock and more complex in flavor.
The vegetables:
Heres where you get a chance to add sweetness from carrots and parsnips, complexity from celery, and depth from onion. Most importantly you need onion skin for depth of color. The single most important difference in making a deep brown colored stock is not roasted chicken bits, but onion skin.
This is also where you can do irreparable damage to a stock. Adding green vegetables like asparagus or broccoli is fatal especially with a long closed-in simmer. A build-up of things like asparagine in the stock without letting those escape will make it smell and taste like dog pee… or worse… cat pee.
Vegetables with fleeting flavor (like turnip) you should not waste your time with at this stage. If you want them in the soup or stew, prepare them separately later and recombine. In stock-making, their flavors are so volatile as to just evaporate off. Unlike a sturdy carrot, a long 8 hour stock cook is also going to turn a turnip or rutabaga into mush.
Herbs and spice:
This, I am quite certain is where the magic happens in stock making. Plants have a significant evolutionary disadvantage in terms of survival: they cannot run away. As a result, over a billion years or so plants have developed secondary compounds to thwart the nefarious advances of insects, fungi and herbivores. These secondary compounds are the essence of what we recognize as cinnamon, clove, anise, thyme, mint, cumin, turmeric, ginger, and a panoply of other spices and herbs.
That we associate them with flavor is because we smell them. That we smell them is a result of their volatility. That they are volatile means they can be released with heat. The more organic (in the chemical sense of the word, not the tree-hugger sense) the more they are extracted by oils (like chicken fat), and the more aqueous, the more it’s just water. But too much heat and you can just drive them off. So there’s fine art to this.
Making chicken stock is a terrific balance of the organic and the aqueous for extracting all that is good and beautiful from herbs and spices. Critically, this has to be done below boiling temperature over a long period lest one just drive-off all of the awesomeness that evolved over eons. It should also be done with whole spices (not powdered) to avoid a muddy stock needing a cheese-cloth straining later.
This is also where you are going to make decisions about how your stock is going to be used. Certain choices are going to be show-stoppers. I rarely ever put black peppercorns in a stock for exactly that reason. It’s impossible to remove their sharpness. Asian long pepper has a unique musky quality while adding everything you would want from peppercorns. I put them in every stock.
If you’re making phở, then star anise, coriander and ginger root are a must (and cloves, cardamom, and cinnamon as you like).
If this will be used in an Italian dish, I recommend fennel seed.
Stock for Canadian tourtière? Cinnamon sticks and cloves.
Making a mole? Cinnamon sticks, cumin seed, epazote and guajillos.
Caribbean? Allspice, ginger root and fresh thyme. But honestly thyme can easily be brought in later at the application stage.
Szechuan? Szechuan peppercorns (but not cloves as well). You will discover a depth and earthiness to these buds not so overpowering as the whole mala sensation. Star anise too, and I like the depth of Aleppo pepper.
The only green things that typically go in to my stocks are celery, bay leaves, and kombu; I even leave things like thyme and sage for downstream. For the longest time I thought bay leaves were a hoax. As with other laurels like sassafras, fresh or freshly dried leaves are unmistakably aromatic. But dropping anything from one to a dozen into a marinara sauce never seemed to make a difference. The reason is…
Temperature:
The volatile compounds of bay leaf and many other things you might put into the making of stock are fleeting. If you had a distillation column parked above your stock on a rolling boil you might capture some of that. If not, you’re just driving all of those flavors off and into the atmosphere. It is critical to steep a stock at a temperature that is less than a boil. By this I don’t just mean less than a rolling boil where there’s still a blup and blop every few seconds (like Alton Brown suggests). No boil, no blup, no blop.
You want this right underneath a boil: more than 185 F and less than 200 F. This is a sweet spot above which plant material like cellulose and lignins will break down releasing their goodness (herbs and spices alike) and below a heat at which those aromatics get driven off. Everything you want from the chicken itself will easily get extracted at this temperature too. Preventing a boil also promotes the creation of a clear stock lacking the milky emulsification of fats and albumins.
As for time, I think the measure is whether all of the connective tissue is dissolved into the stock. Eight hours seems right. You will know this has happened because the chicken skin falls apart like wet tissue paper, and the ends of the leg bones are no longer slick.
So much of, if not in fact all, the collagen and elastin will have dissolved into the stock that a few hours in the fridge might let you stand up a spoon in it. That’s a result of long chain proteins. And that’s delicious. And unctuous. As well as nutritious. It’s also a head-start on making Soup Dumplings.
Don’t try do this overnight on a open stove like I once did. It took a month to get the pungent smell of burnt chicken out of our clothes and bedding. Eight hours on a stovetop you can keep an eye on, or 8 hours overnight in an Instant Pot on slow cook at medium is what I do.
A well made stock will leave chicken bones clean of meat, and meat that taste of nothing for having given up its all to the stock. However… taste the carrots after they cool…
Decant it and put in the fridge to cool so you can scrape the fat off the top. Throw the rest away, but save those carrots. Something magic has happened.