Soup Stock for the People

Making soup stock is kind of my favorite thing. It makes for a sorta special event in my house. I do it once or twice a month, which aids in cleaning out the fridge and my very soul. I go through a whole mental inventory process that is mostly helpful, but tinged with loss and grief and sadness. One of my best girlfriends, with whom I am no longer close, taught me to make stock. So like it or not, every time I go through this process, or use the final product, I remember her and the friendship we no longer really share, and I grieve the loss of my friend a little. But, in addition to that grief, there exists a balancing force in remembering the joy we shared, and in the idea that although I guess we have moved on in our lives, her influence and spirit will always stay with me. And I like that a lot. From that, I take with me the idea of salvaging the good out of a thing, which is a direct parallel to making my own soup stock from scratch.

To me, making soup stock is nothing short of alchemy. You take the gross parts of all the old shit you don’t want anymore and boil them down into a flavory explosion of infinite possibilities. I don’t really do it to save money on buying store-bought stock, although it is a happy coincidence, as much as I do it to add another layer of flavor to my soups, sauces and even tacos. I still buy and use the store bought stuff. Nothing really replaces that delicious boxed “chicken” flavor. But making stock consumes time, requires intensive labor, and makes your whole house smell like – hrm, let’s see, which ethnic group can I co-opt into this metaphor to my greatest possible use at their greatest possible expense (because everybody knows I love a good marginalizing) – you know how some people say that Slavs and Gypsies smell like soup? Well, if you are making soup stock and you go outside to take out the trash or get the mail or whatever, and you come back in, the very first thought in your brain will be Holy Shit! It smells like a truckload of Slavs in here, which can either be totally soothing or a little creepy and uncomfortable, depending on your exposure to travelling circus carnival midway workers as a child. Alright, that’s probably enough sad and semi-ironic racist shit for this blog episode. But never fear! I am sure there will probably be plenty of both in pretty much every post yet to come. Delicious Ironing!

Sometimes you're just left holding a bag of shit.

Anyhoo, the basic idea is that you get yourself a gallon sized Ziploc Freezer Bag, which shall become your tried and trusted friend throughout all of your cooking endeavors. Anytime you chop an onion, put the skins and the root and end into your Ziploc. Garlic? Skins and roots and eyes into the Ziploc. Carrots? Scrub ‘em off good, then skin them with a veggie peeler and place them skins and root ends into your damn Ziploc. Celery stalks looking a little limp and you have no desire to eat them whatsoever, and to be quite honest, you weren’t gonna eat them shits even from the moment you bought and paid for their pristine asses at the grocery store? Chop them and their leaves into the bag. Left over sautéed carrots even the dog refused? Into the Ziploc. Thyme or Sage you bought for that one fucking chicken soup recipe so now you have 800 sprigs and no possible use? Into the bag. Anything in the onion, garlic, shallot or scallion family, save every part you don’t eat. Bell peppers work great too. I don’t use potatoes in my stock, because potatoes can add too much starchy something or other to the water. Also, potatoes suck out the salt and flavor of the chicken. Or possibly I invented that entirely, for no particular reason. When your Ziploc is full (about 2 weeks for me) the time has arrived to get crazy on the microphone.
 

You had a good run, bird.

Most chicken stock recipes call for you to go to the store and purchase literal POUNDS of wings and giblets and gizzards and all manner of gnarly shit I don’t like, roast them on a special “roasting” pan (as if) and do a bunch of other stuff. I find that to be silly. As previously mentioned, I occasionally like to purchase a whole baked chicken with the skin still on it at the grocery store. After removing the breasts and thighs and surrounding not-too-icky meats, the remaining carcass and wings make for a fantastic chickeny base for your soup stock. You can totally go buy a pallet of wings and drummies, but Christ, then you’re just giving the grocery store what they want.

Not a picture of Bay Leaves at all.

Additionally, let’s talk about Bay Leaves. I would say that I have probably made 40,000 recipes this year so far. Approximately 39,500 have called for Bay Leaves, and I, being a dummy, didn’t include the Bay Leaves because I didn’t own any. I just assumed that they weren’t all that important and people who include a fucking bay leaf in their recipe directions are just try-hards and probably in the pocket of Big Bay Leaf. Then I needed some other madras this or smoked paprika that for something else, and while I was in the spice aisle, I said, alright fine, you win, Bay Leaf-Industrial Complex. I will purchase one stupid bottle of stupid leaves and actually use them as intended in my soups and stuff. Now, I would put bay leaves in my morning coffee if it didn’t adversely affect my gout so badly. If you ask me, bay leaves were invented for soup stock and I apologize to all the soups and soup stocks I have ever made that did not include them. Never again. Never forget.

Finally, a word about equipment. Part of the awesome part of making soup stock is figuring out how to do it using what you have on hand. You will for sure need a giant stock pot, a couple or three large containers (one of them with a lid) and a couple of straining devices. I have a medium-fine strainer and a tiny super fine strainer (which doubles awesomely as a powdered sugar dusting sieve thing) that team up to make one awesome ambiguously gay duo of straining power. So, I encourage you to open up all those low and high cabinets and dig around and locate all those weird ass 5 gallon Tupperwares you must have inherited with the house, rummage up the bizarro strainer with the weird vegetables drawn in 1964 on the handle and get ready for some mad science.

Shizz Besides the Basics:
Large stock pot

Slotted spoon

Medium strainer

Fine Strainer

Large container with lid


Ingredients:
3 to 5 quarts of water

2 bay leaves

½ teaspoon salt

8 to 10 whole peppercorns

Chicken carcass + wings

Leftovers from the Bourgeois Kit to Healthy Living.

(What just happened to be in my Ziploc this time): leeks, carrot peels and ends, tops and roots and skins of green onions, yellow sweet onions, and red onions, a bunch of thyme, ¼ of a Serrano pepper, celery stalks and leaves, bunch of sage, 2 chicken bones from dinner out (Yes, it’s true, I get my bones to-go in a doggie bag to supplement my soup stocks because I like to use the whole buffalo), garlic skins and eyes and bruised or generally weirdy bulbs.

Order of Operations:
1. Set your stove on about 6 or 7 and fill up your stock pot about halfway with water (3 to 4 quarts).

In the hot tub, poppin' bubbly.

2. Add peppercorns and salt.

3. Slowly slide in your gross chicken carcass and any skin or meat or bones that tried to escape. Make sure you have removed the elastic bungee that, more than likely, was twisted round your bird tighter than the new Radiohead album.

4. Bring your stock pot to a boil, reduce heat to maybe 4 ½ or 5, enough to keep a gentle rolling boil to the water, and cook for about an hour or until your Spidey-sense tells you the bird has had enough.

What out for the face suckers, too.

5. Remove stock pot from heat and, using your slotted spoon, skim 90 to 95% of the bones and meat flotsam out and discard.

Post-modern trash transmutation.

6. Add bay leaves and contents of Ziploc Freezer Bag to stock pot chicken water.


7. Add enough water to bring your stock pot back up to about half full. See there, jerks? I said half full not half empty. I guess all that mainlining of Prozac directly into my eyeball is finally starting to pay off :)

Rubbing ya spot love, got ya screaming Punish Me.

8. Bring your veggies and water back up to a gentle boil, slap a lid on your stock pot if you can remember where you put it, and then boil it up for at least one hour, but probably not much more than 2 hours. Basically, until you have to go run errands or pay attention to your family, or do whatever shit you probably have been procrastinating against by doing this little cooking project in the first place.



9. When time is up, remove your pot from the heat and let it cool off for 20 to 30 minutes, so as not to burn your fool hands off while handling it.

10. Whilst you are waiting for your shit to cool, set up your crime lab in your kitchen sink, or another place where you can get messy and splashy. My lab consists of one 4-Cup measuring cup, one big ass Tupperware, and one big ass metal bowl and my 2 strainers. But like I said, it’s fun to figger out what you already have that can satisfy your needs. Ifyouknowwhatimsayin.

Make stock, not meth. Or at least stock AND meth.

11. Once your shit has chilled out enough to be easily handled (lol yah right) then do your first pass at straining. Basically, you pour shit from one container to another, through a sieve, about 20 times or until there are no longer any grody chunks or serious sediment hanging out. So, begin by setting up your bigger strainer over your large measuring cup and pour off most of the liquid from your stock.

This used to be part of Pee Wee's Automatic Breakfast Machine.

12. Pour what’s in your measuring cup through your fine strainer into your big ass Tupperware and then go back to your stock pot full of limp and boiled veggie parts. Using your slotted spoon, scoop one or two heaping spoonfuls of veggiestuffs into your medium strainer, placed back over your empty measuring cup.

Women always be draining essences and discarding.

13. Then use the back of your slotted spoon to mash any and all precious drops of stock liquid out of your veggies. Once they stop giving up the ghost, scoop out your dry and mashed veggieguts into your big garbage bowl. Repeat process until you get all the way through your stock pot, or until your measuring cup fills up again, then empty it thru the small strainer, into your big Tupperware with the rest of the strained stock.

14. This all sounds weird because I am writing it out in words, but I swear it is fairly intuitive and mostly impossible to fuck up, so just jump right in there and start pouring and splashing around with the intent of isolating the flavor water from the boiled out veggie parts and sediment.

15. OK. You’ve emptied your stock pot. You’ve filled your garbage bowl. You’ve topped your Tupperware. Here’s what’s up now: soap out your stock pot so that no fat solids or veggie shits remain. Using your finest (meaning the one having the smallest of holes in it, not the one what looks like Vivica A. Fox) strainer, pour the Tupperware into the stock pot. Next, soap out your Tupperware and pour out your stockpot, thru the fine strainer, back into your Tupperware. Do this until you are reasonably sure you have removed as much sediment and fat as you can without going totally OCD freakout on it. Make sure all the stock is back in the Tupperware when you decide you are done with this shit for now. Slap the lid on your stock and somehow manage to find room in your fridge for it.

16. Forget about that shit until tomorrow. Whisper words of wisdom to it and let that mother be.

Why liposuction is gross.

17. 8 to 24 hours later, pull that Tupperware out da fridge and witness the miracle of fat separation that has magically occurred right there in your own goddamn kitchen. There should be some gnarly chicken fat chillin’ right on top of your stock, exactly where you want it.



  

Losing fat is all the rage.

18. Use your slotted spoon to skim and scoop out as much of the fat as possible and discard it.

Super-fine and full of holes. Also pictured, a sieve.

19. Retrieve your stock pot from your dish rack and begin another round of back and forth pouring and straining with your fine mesh strainer until you can no longer see fat solids hanging out in the mesh of your sieve. Oops I forgot to tell you that it is probably not only beneficial, but doggone necessary to rinse out your fine mesh strainer between each pour. The fat solids collect super quickly, and negatively affect your strainer’s ability to do its god-given duty. So keep an eye on that.

20. So right about now you should have a big old batch of approx 2 to 4 quarts of soup stock. Separate them out into servings of 2 cups or 4 cups or 14 oz or whatever you use, and put them in freezer- and microwave-safe containers, then freeze them up or use them at your leisure.

21. This stock will start to be gross and rotten after about a week in your fridge. Use it 50-50 with boxed chicken stock in soups that call for it. I prefer the mix. All one or the other is weirdish, but half and half or 3 to 1 works pretty awesomely in all soups I have thus far tried. Also, if your house is like my house and you have to have tacos at least once a week or the sky will literally fall down upon your pointed little heads, use this stock instead of the water, after you add the taco seasoning to your browned beef. It really makes your tacos savory and flavory and pleasing to all people involved. It also works magnificently in veloute sauces.

22. Congrats, you are awesome and your crisper is cleaned out and you have made culinary gold out of the detritus of your life. I’m real proud of you. Real proud.