Making chicken stock is simple, add bones, aromatics and water into a pot and cook them for a long time. I’ve shared my technique for making clear chicken consumé with perfectly cooked meat, but what if you want want a rich creamy stock to use as an ingredient, or for making an unctuous soup like chicken ramen?
The trick to getting a rich creamy soup is to use parts of the chicken that have a lot of collagen and fat, cooking them long enough to allow the collagen to break down into gelatin, and then emulsifying the fat into the stock.
The best parts of the chicken for their combination of skin, cartilage and well exercised meat are the wing tips. This is the part you usually use as a handle when you’re chowing down on buffalo wings. My butcher happens to separate the wing tips from the meaty part of the wing, so I can pick up a big bag of them for about a dollar. If you ask around and can’t find anyone to sell you just the wing tips, whole chicken wings will work as well (your stock will just be a lot more expensive)
While the wing tips have a ton of skin and collagen, they don’t have much in the way of bones, which is why I like to use a 50/50 mix of wing tips and other chicken bones (leg bones, carcases, etc). This gives you the best of both worlds, in that you get a rich creamy texture from the wing tips and full-bodied chicken flavor from the larger bones.
Getting a soup that’s light in color is all about reducing the amount of blood that gets mixed into the soup. One way to do this is to boil the bones once and dump out the water. This is the method I use for my Beef Pho and Tonkotsu Ramen because the bones involved are very large and because both beef and pork can have a gamey taste that the first boil helps tame. I don’t like using this method for chicken because it’s milder in flavor and because you lose a fair amount of that flavor when you do a double boil.
Instead, I start by scrubbing away as much blood as I can before cooking the bones, and then diligently scoop off the brown foam that floats to the surface. The foam is created by the proteins in the blood coagulating and will not only give you stock an off-flavor, it will turn the soup brown unless it’s removed.
As for aromatics, what you add depends on the kind of stock you want to make. If you want a standard stock, try celery greens, carrots, onions, bay leaves, and black pepper. If you want a ramen stock, fry some garlic, ginger and scallion whites until nearly burned. If you want to go for something more southeast asian, shallots, lemongrass, galangal, garlic and star anise make a great combo.
Units
Ingredients
- 1 kilogram chicken wing tips
- 1 kilogram chicken bones
- 10 cups water
- aromatics (optional)
Instructions
- Clean your chicken well, under cold running water. Focus on the cut surfaces and if you see blood coming out, squeeze the muscle tissue around the area to coax out any blood remaining in the meat. If you are using whole carcasses, use a spoon to scrape out all the dark organ bits inside the carcass, especially along the spine and ribs. Your chicken should be as clean and blood-free on the inside as it is on the outside.
- In a 7-10 quart pressure cooker, add the chicken and water and bring it to a rolling boil. Use a skimmer to scrape away the foam that accumulates on the surface. Keep skimming until there's no more foam coming to the surface.
- When the stock is clean, add your aromatics and turn the heat off.
- Secure the lid to the pressure cooker and then turn the heat back on high. Let the cooker come up to pressure (it will start whistling) and then turn the heat progressively down until you hear a slow gentle whistle. If the whistling stops after a while, turn the heat back up slightly. Set a timer for 1 hour.
- After the chicken cooks for an hour you can either let the pressure drop naturally or opt for one of the quick release methods for your particular cooker.
- After the pressure drops and you open up the cooker, use a large whisk to whisk chicken stock, breaking up the chunks into a pulp. This does two things. This releases the collagen in the meat and skin into the soup, and is what gives your soup its thick luscious texture and creamy taste.
- After you're done whisking, pass the stock through a colander into another pot or large bowl, then press on the solids with the back of a ladle to squeeze out as much flavor as you can from the pulp.
- Return the solids to a pot and add enough water to cover the solids. Bring the mixture to a boil, and then whisk and strain this into the bowl with the other stock, pressing on the solids to get as much stock out as you can.
- Discard the solids, and then wash out the pot. Use a fine mesh (double mesh) sieve to strain your stock back into the pot and let this cool to room temperature.
- While your stock is cooling, it will separate into layers, and you'll see the oil float to the top. This is part of what makes the stock so creamy, so you need to emulsify this back into the mixture. The best way to do this is by using an immersion blender, but if you don't have one, you can just pour the stock into a regular blender in batches and blend it until the mixture is milky and white. Divy this up into containers and store it in the fridge.
- The stock will solidify in the refrigerator, this is the collagen (a.k.a. gelatin) at work and means you made a good stock. To use the stock, just reheat it and whisk to emulsify the mixture.
Rachel says
Well I just made this by accident and after reading a whole bunch of articles about cloudy stock-mine is definitely more than cloudy-,I found this article and it made me feel better….at least I know it’s edible albeit more fattening 😄. Thanks for the pictures too!
Marc Matsumoto says
Hi Rachel, sounds like you had a serendipitous accident, these rich broths are used in chicken ramen, and are a coveted outcome for that’s hard to get if you don’t know the right tricks 😉 Glad you decided to look into it rather than toss it!