moment of cultural cross-pollination

[coraa]

Today I was feeling iffy, so I decided to make chicken soup with rice for dinner.

(Cora's standard chicken soup recipe for two: finely mince half an onion (or a couple of shallots, if you have shallots) and a couple of cloves of garlic. Thinly slice three carrots and two sticks of celery. (It's okay if the carrots and celery are beginning to look long in the metaphorical tooth, since you're going to cook the hell out of them anyway.) In a heavy-bottomed soup pot that has a lid, heat up a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil, or schmaltz (rendered chicken fat) if you have it.* Gently sweat (that is, cook at a low enough temperature that it doesn't quite sizzle) the vegetables in the fat (with about a teaspoon of salt) until they're soft and fragrant, 10-15 minutes. Pour in about a quart of chicken stock (homemade if you have it, low-sodium canned works too, boullion is probably too salty for this). If you're feeling ambitious, you can reduce a cup of white wine to 1/2 cup in a separate pan and add it; if you aren't, just the chicken stock is fine. Add a bay leaf, some ground black pepper, and more salt if the broth seems too flat. Then add two skinless chicken thighs on the bone to the liquid and bring to a boil. When it hits a boil, reduce the heat to a low simmer and put the lid on. Cook until the chicken is cooked through (30-ish minutes, but make sure its juices are clear when you stab it with a knife; if they aren't, put it back and simmer longer). When the chicken is cook through, remove to a plate, and let cool until you can handle it, then shred it to bite-size pieces. Meanwhile, add rice or noodles and cook through. When the starch is cooked, return the shredded chicken to the pot, along with fresh sage or thyme or rosemary or parsley, whatever herbs you like,** and heat through. Ladle up and serve.)

Only -- I got to the point where I was simmering, and I asked jmpava to give it a taste, to see if it needed more salt, or pepper, or whatever. (Sometimes when I'm tasting the soup frequently, I sort of lose my ability to judge whether it needs salt, for instance.)

Me: How was it?
Him: Fine. Maybe could use some... hm.
Me: What?
Him: ...Some herbs or something? Maybe?
Me: Yeah, I'm adding sage later.
Him: Yeah, that'd be good.
Him: ...
Him: ...
Him: You know what it tastes like?
Me: What?
Him: It tastes like it needs matzoh balls.
Me: Yeah?
Me: I can do matzoh balls.
Him: Really?
Me: Sure.
Him: That'd be yummy.

I hadn't realized until just now that matzoh ball soup (his childhood comfort food) and chicken soup with rice (my childhood comfort food) differed really only by starch. But there you go! That's kinda cool, really.

Me: It probably doesn't hurt that I started it with schmaltz.
Him: Heh.

* - Part of the reason that I buy whole chickens and cut them up is so that I can always arrange to have schmaltz, because omg, yum. Also, that ensures a steady supply of homemade chicken broth.
** - If you're looking for recommendations, I like thyme or sage best for chicken soup.

Comments

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Well, the way I do it is this: when I cut up a chicken, I save all the pieces of skin that I'm not leaving on the various cuts of chicken (I usually keep the legs and wings skin-on, but strip the skin off the breasts), and also strip the skin off the remaining carcass (I save the back, breastbone, spine, etc., for stock, but I don't need the skin for stock so I pull it off). I also trim off the big pieces of fat in various places -- around the neck, at the leg joint, etc. Basically, I trim off all the obvious chunks of fat, and all the skin I won't be wanting for when I cook the chicken. I stick it in a quart-sized ziplock freezer bag, which I keep in the freezer and keep adding pieces of skin/fat to every time I cut up a chicken.

Eventually the bag is bulging full and beginning to be hard to close. I defrost it slightly (not all the way, since partly-frozen fat/skin is much easier to cut up than totally defrosted fat/skin, which is squishy), chop it up coarsely, and put it in a big, deep frying pan.

Technically, you can just heat all the fat/skin over low heat until it starts to melt, but I'm afraid of scorching, so I add 1/4 cup of water to the pan when I begin, and then heat it over medium-low heat. The water will eventually all boil off, but before it does enough fat will melt to keep the skin from scorching/sticking. Then you just cook gently over medium-low heat, stirring once in a while, until you have a pan full of golden liquid chicken fat with little crispy bits of skin floating in it. You want to keep cooking until the skin is shriveled and golden-brown; if it's still pasty and flabby, there's still fat to render out of it. It takes a surprisingly long time but doesn't need much tending, although I wouldn't leave the pan alone for very long, because the last thing you want it to do is burn (or catch fire!). But mostly it takes care of itself.

When the skin is little crispy blobs and the fat is liquid, turn off the heat and let it cool just a little (not too long or it'll solidify, but it's easier if you aren't dealing with blazing hot oil!) and then pour it through a fine-mesh strainer, or a piece of cheesecloth lining a colander, into a heat-resistant bowl or measuring cup. This will strain out the solid bits of chicken, leaving you with just the liquid fat, which should be clear and faintly golden in color. I let it cool a bit more and pour it into an ice-cube tray and put it in the freezer to set up, which gives me roughly 2 tbsp measures of schmaltz. When it's totally solid, I pop it out into a ziplock and keep it in the freezer.

(Side note: the fried skin bits left at the end taste amazingly good, and are amazingly bad for you. I usually eat a few as a treat, and throw the rest away.)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

(Three side notes. One: when I buy large cuts of beef and cut them down into individual steaks/roasts, I usually wind up trimming off a lot of beef fat, which can be rendered the same way. It's not quite as flavorful as chicken fat, but sometimes the milder taste is nice. Technically, it's called tallow, although that sounds like something meant for soap or candles, not for eating. I'd make my own lard, too, if I had a good source of pork fat.

Two: Schmaltz -- or tallow -- can be used to replace vegetable oil in a 1:1 ratio. Replacing butter with it is a little more complicated, since butter is part water but schmaltz/tallow/lard is basically pure fat, but in applications like sauteeing vegetables, it doesn't seem to make much difference.

Three: I think the health detriments of animal fat have been somewhat overrated, especially for a nation that eats so much palm kernel oil, trans-fats and high fructose corn syrup, but it is higher in cholesterol and saturated fat than most vegetable oils. For the applications I use it for, one or two tablespoons at a time once or twice a week, I really don't think it makes much difference for people not on low-cholesterol diets, but for people who do have to watch that kind of thing, it's important to note. Still, for my money, I'd rather use an animal fat I've rendered myself and know where it came from than a shortening I don't.)

[tedeisenstein.livejournal.com]

About butter and water content: you do know how to make clarified butter, right? That'd remove a lot of the water content and other 'milk solids', makes butter less likely to burn, and so forth. I've seen some references to a kind of butter ghee, which I am given to understand is, well, clarified butter with an Indian label.

(Melt butter gently. Let it sit for a short while. At the bottom should be a small amount of milky-looking stuff; this is the stuff you can toss down the sink. The rest is clarified butter.)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, I've made clarified butter, and ghee. My point was that if a recipe that calls for ordinary butter, you can't replace with a pure fat. If a recipe calls for a pure fat, obviously you can.

[tedeisenstein.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. When I cook chicken (roasted or broiled, and whole chickens, quarters, wings, whatever), I've put it into a cast-iron pan and added a little butter and the usual spices. There's always a lot of liquid stuff left in the pan after cooking - part chicken fat, part butter, part stuff. (Some people have grease cans that they pour bacon grease into after cooking? I also have a chicken can, used only for chicken liquids, into which I put the melted chicken fat, butter, and other stuff (which, well, gelatinizes; think of a salmon en gelee, or cold clear consommee - it looks like Jello when it comes out of the refrigerator).

It's not schmaltz, quite. But it's not quite not-schmaltz, either. I wonder what I'd have to do to get Schmaltz(tm) out of it....

[coraa.livejournal.com]

That I wouldn't know - I'm too eager to use the drippings off roast chicken to make a pan sauce to think of anything else to do with them!