Stock homework

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lenb
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Joined: 2014-02-08 14:50
Stock homework

Hello Chef,
I chose chicken stock for my homework.  I bought 4 bags of chicken bones at my local market and roasted as described.  No idea how many pounds of bones I had.  I got them at a local meat market.  They were all leg/thigh pieces and I learned one thing: if your roasting pan is full , it is very difficult to turn over leg/thigh pieces.  Next time, if I have the same mix, I'll take a shears and split them at the joint.  At any rate, except for setting off my smoke alarm and my difficulty turning them, everything went pretty well.   .  Deglazing the pans was straightforward   and the resulting stock is awesome, much better than previous attempts.  I just used it to make rice and the result is the best chicken soup I've ever had, just without the soup.  

Since I made the stock in a pressure cooker, I only cooked the bones for an hour and so I did a second extraction (remoulage?) combining the bones from two cookers into one.  This turned out very well, it appears to be as gelatinous and tasty as the first batch.  

I also wanted to thank you for mentioning the importance of rapidly cooling and refrigerating the stock.  In the past, I've been lax about this but after thinking about it I realize it's important for food safety.  On the web, I found the suggestion to cool it to between 110-120F  as quickly as possible and then refridgerate it.

I now have 9 quarts of awesome stock and just need to decide what to make with it first (suggestions welcome). Thanks for the great videos.
--Len