So you remember how I casually mentioned to hold on to your chicken carcass last week?

It’s time to take it back out of the fridge and put it to good use.

Now, I do eat meat, but I’m not really big on killing things in general.

I’ve never been a vegetarian; I don’t feel guilt for this, but I do feel if something gave it’s life for my nourishment then the last thing I should be doing is wasting any of it.

Enter: the chicken stock.

It’s super easy. It makes use of all the parts of the chicken that might otherwise be thrown out. And you’ll be left with more chicken than you would have ever been able to carve otherwise.

Make it in bulk and it can be frozen for months. It just takes a bit of time and you need, if not a chicken carcass, then at least a bag full of bones.

The same recipe can be used to make beef stock, if you instead use t-bones or other beef bones. Or even a pork stock, if you use some ribs or something.

A vegetable stock can be made by following the same recipe and simply omitting the chicken or beef.

This is another “use-what-you-got” type recipe. Can you tell I’m a fan of those? I love making stocks at home because not only is it a really simple way to make a big difference in a lot of the food you cook, it’s a great way to make good use of produce that might be a little.. um.. well, on-the-fence? So I tend to grab a variety of things. Greens are generally safe, herbs, onions/garlic, root veggies.. take some chances.

Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 4 hours or more

Ingredients…

- 1 chicken carcass (some skin and meat on the bone is good)
- a few chicken bones (if you have leftover legs or wings, throw them in)
- 1-2 cup kale
- 1 cup cress
- 2 carrots
- 2-3 garlic cloves
- 1/2 onion
- 2 bay leaves
- 1/4 cup parsley
- 1/4 cup sage
- salt
- pepper

Alright let’s go.

Put the chicken or beef pieces into a large stock pot. Fill the pot up with water so that the carcass and bones are fully submerged.

Begin heating over medium heat.

Peel garlic cloves and put them into the pot, whole.

Break or chop up carrots into smaller pieces and add them in the pot.

Add kale, cress, and herbs to the pot. Chop the half onion up and add that as well, follow with generous toss of salt and pepper.

Increase the heat on the pot and bring the water to a boil, then turn it back down to a low simmer.

Let simmer for 4 or more hours, stirring occasionally. The end result here will be the liquid stock so the longer you cook it, the more water will evaporate and the more concentrated your stock will be. If you cover it, it will cook longer.. but if you leave it uncovered the wonderful smell of it will permeate your house more thoroughly.

Once it’s done, strain all the liquid out into a large bowl. Incidentally, now’s the best time to get any last chicken left on the bones because it will all come off very easily. The joints will all be dissolving here and the meat will just fall off the bone. Usually there’s enough here for a salad or two, or maybe a couple sandwiches.

Let the liquid cool in the bowl for awhile, and then you’ll need to store it. I usually use a combination of mason jars and ice cube trays. The ice cube trays get filled with stock, frozen, and then you can keep them in a zip loc bag in the freezer for a nice, long time. The mason jars get put in the fridge.. they’re good for about a week – because of this short lifespan I tend to freeze most of it and just use the jars for one or two meals I’m already planning that week.

Chicken, beef, and vegetable stock can be used in soups and in just about anything that can be cooked in water. Simply substitute the water for your stock. I like using it to cook rice or couscous, even pasta sometimes. I’m sure there are many more uses that I’ve never thought of.

Do you have any favorite uses or recipes for your stock?

So I’d like to introduce a concept here in a little quickie post.

You’ll notice over there on your right that I’ve posted a food miles chart. Food miles are, in a nutshell, how far your food has traveled to get to you. Implicit in this definition is the cost of processing, the cost of labor, the cost of transportation, the pollution from energy expended, the time that food product has spent traveling to you, and so on. There are no rules here, and I know that many things I eat are bona fide world travelers. But I do find that it’s nice to be aware of this information about your food, even if it doesn’t totally influence every decision that you make. Let’s be realistic – everyone’s going to make their exceptions. But it doesn’t hurt to know, does it?

Estimated food miles charts will be posted with every recipe. I will link the items to their source so you can see where I got them from. In (hopefully) most cases, it will be a local farmer’s market or my CSA group – Olin Fox Farms. More on CSAs in a future post.

You can make the best mozzarella cheese in your kitchen in one hour with 4 ingredients. It actually took me more like two hours, but that’s because I completely screwed up THE VERY FIRST STEP of the damn process.

It’s actually really easy if you follow instructions (unlike me). There are two ingredients that you’ll probably have to obtain over the web, but other than that you just need whole milk, salt, and a thermometer. Those two ingredients are rennet and citric acid, and adding those ingredients to your milk causes the curd to separate from the whey.

You will need…

- 1 gallon whole milk
- Citric acid
- 1 tablet vegetable rennet
- Salt
- Candy/cheese thermometer
- Rubber gloves

You can buy the items individually pretty cheap, or you can go to the Cheese Queen and buy a starter kit – you’ll get everything you need there for a good price (except the gloves and milk).

First, mix 1 tbsp citric acid in 1 cup of cool water and set aside to dissolve. Mix 1 rennet tablet in 1/4 cup of cool water and dissolve. After the citric acid has dissolved, pour 1 gallon of whole milk into a large stock pot at the same time as the acid mixture. Stir thoroughly for 30 seconds, and set the burner on medium-high heat. Okay… time out. This was where I screwed up. Yes – this early in the game. I didn’t mix the citric acid with the milk when I put it in the stock pot and wound up trying to throw it in later. Worst part was I didn’t even realize it until I was at the final steps of the process. One superfast trip to the store and back and take two was much more successful. Now let us never speak of this again.

A word here about milk. Make sure you get good milk for this, because your final product will be a reflection of it. You want to use whole milk, and you really want to use local, hormone free, grass-fed milk too (even if you don’t know it yet). I get my milk products from a creamery in the Shenandoah Valley – it’s really tasty and readily available, you can get it from Whole Foods. Whatever you do, make sure you do not use ultra-pasteurized milk, as it won’t work. Ultra-pasteurization is a process that uses an extreme and immediate heating process (through steam) to raise the milk temperature to 280 degrees or higher for at least two seconds so it can better travel halfway around the world to reach grocery store shelves. Unfortunately, this flattens the protein molecules (which are normally three dimensional), preventing the enzymes from being able to attach and break them down. Regular pasteurization is a process requiring slow heating, and it’s the more common process you’ll see on any milk you get that hasn’t come across the country to reach you. It’s probably not a bad idea to stay away from ultra-pasteurization in general, but it’s paramount in cheesemaking endeavors, as the flash heating from ultra-pasteurization will prevent your curd and whey from separating properly. There are also some questions as to the safety of the aseptic tetra-brik containers leeching endocrines into your milk, but I think this concern is pretty minimal. Still, always better to err on the safe side.

The best part about Shenandoah Valley Creamery? It’s cheap! It comes in glass bottles and Whole Foods refunds $2 for every bottle returned. A quart of milk runs about 99 cents after return.

Once your milk and citric acid is in the stock pot, bring the temperature up to 90 degrees – use your thermometer to be precise about it and keep the milk moving. Once it hits 90, stir the rennet mixture into the pot for at least 30 seconds, and move it off the heat and cover for 5-7 minutes. The curd will start to harden and become substantial.

Using a long knife, slice through the curd in a criss-crossed pattern all the way to the bottom of the pot. As the whey separates, it should look a bit like this:

Move the pot back onto the heat and bring the curd up to 105 degrees. Keep the curd moving around the pot with a gentle stir. You want to try to preserve the shapes.

After it gets to 105, take it off the heat and let it sit, covered, for another 5-7 minutes. Longer will make for a firmer curd. Next, drain as much of the whey out of the pot as you can while at the same time trying not to lose any curd. If I haven’t been clear, the whey is the clear translucent liquid and the curd is the hardened white substance. This is the difficult part of the process – you can try straining with a cheesecloth, or holding the curd back while pouring the whey out of a pot. I had to recruit my wife to hold a pot lid over the stock pot while I poured the whey out into the sink, stopping and spinning the pot around every few seconds. Truth be told, a bit awkward. And difficult. But we made it happen.

There are two methods to finish from here out, which both consist of heating the curd a few times over. It can be done in a microwave or heated in a water bath. I went with the microwave.

Once you’ve gotten as much whey out as you can, add 1 tbsp of salt and mix it up. Use the best salt you can – sea salt is good, or my personal favorite Himalayan pink (more on salt in a future post, I promise). Then put it in a microwave safe bowl and microwave it for 30 seconds. Put on your rubber gloves – the curd will be hot now and you don’t want to handle it with your bare hands. Then repeat the whey draining process. Then microwave again. Drain. Heat one more time again if necessary. By the 2nd or 3rd time through the microwave, you should be at a point where you have gotten rid of enough whey that the cheese will form correctly. If you get the curd warm enough (up around 135 degrees), it will start to become stretchy when you pull it apart. This never happened for me but it still turned out great anyway. When you get towards the end of the whey, get your hands good and messy (that’s what the gloves are for, anyway), and play with the curd to press out more of the whey – you pretty much want as much as possible to get out of it, but when it comes to the right consistency you’ll know. Stretch it out, ball it up, squeeze it, repeat. I would imagine this process would be fairly effective as an anger management exercise.

Whey?

NO WHEY!

Once you’ve gotten all good and messy, and squeezed a good bit of the whey out of the curd to the point where you are satisfied, plunge the mozzarella into a bowl of ice water. Make sure you’ve sliced off some warm cheese to taste, first. It’s the best. The ice bowl is necessary for it to retain a good shape. I wound up with about 3 fist-sized balls of cheese. The amount may vary based on how well your draining process goes.

Leave it in the ice ten minutes or so, and you’re done! Success! That wasn’t so bad, was it?

The mozzarella will last in the fridge for a week to 10 days, or for months if you freeze it. However, if you freeze it it will be a different texture when thawed.. so, not as good for eating raw, but better grated, baked, etc.

We made a caprése salad snack with the fresh mozzarella and it was just ridiculously good – I would not even question the effort considering the result we got. Recipe for the caprése will be my next post. Cost was very minimal. Try it!

Costs…

Milk – $3.50
Rubber gloves – $2.00
Rennet and citric acid – >$1.00 per batch ($24.95 for a kit of 30 from the Cheese Queen)

Total cost – $6.50
Time – about 1 hour

The yield was roughly the equivalent of $15-$20 worth of market price fresh mozzarella.

You can count on seeing me repeat the words “Slow Food” with an almost religious frequency if you follow my blog for any length of time. It’s because Slow Food is just really awesome.

The long and short of it is that the organization, Slow Food, was started in Italy during a public protest of the first McDonald’s to move into Rome. Carlo Petrini was the man behind the plan, and the plan was and is good food, clean food, and fair food for everyone. Slow Food was founded on the basis that we need to preserve world food cultures before they are lost. It emphasizes the value of spending time with your ingredients, with your meals, and with the people you share them with. I’m just going to leave it at that for now, but that description really is only the tip of the iceberg. More info is here – Slow Food International, Slow Food USA.

The local Slow Food DC chapter hosts events in this area. This was the first event I’d ever attended, and, truth be told, my wife and I were a bit nervous. You know that feeling you get when you’re going to a party and you know you won’t know anyone there, but you still really want to impress the host? Yeah it was something like that.

Anyway, the executive chef, Daniel Giusti, at Georgetown’s 1789 restaurant was offering a prix fixe menu (at a very generous prix) featuring ingredients from the Slow Food Presidia. The Presidia is established to assist groups of artisan producers creating unique, traditional, and endangered food products. Slow Food highlights these products by collecting them into the Presidia, and creating a buzz around them. In most cases, these are foods only produced in one place in the world by one particular people in one particular way, and the current state of the industrial-based global food market threatens them into extinction.

Okay, so this place – 1789 – is pretty stuffy. Jacket required, and I think we may have been the only patrons there under the age of 45. I was definitely the only one wearing jeans. Now I can get into the fancy shmancy, trust me, but this was just uncomfortably….. nynyaahhh. I can’t complain about the free valet on a Friday night in Georgetown, though.

The meal totally made up for the atmosphere. And, amazingly, the stuffiness seemed to evaporate into thin air as the wine flowed and the acapella singers arrived in their track suits. No, I’m serious. More on this later. First – the food!

First course was a potato gnocchi, with Surryana ham, chard, and artisanal sheep’s milk cheese.

The sheep’s milk cheese was the Presidia ingredient in this appetizer. While the sheep’s milk cheese was really good, the star of this dish was the Surryana ham. Surryana ham is locally produced, from a farm in Surry, VA. It’s the American counterpart of European Serrano hams. Surryano is dry cured by hand, smoked for 7 days, and aged for 400 more. It was some of the best ham I’ve had in my life.

Second course was roasted duck, more chard, and Anishinaabeg Manoomin wild rice. As the second course was served, a chef came out to speak with us about Slow Food and about the different courses we were eating. I was too excited about the food to remember to take a picture before I had already eaten half the plate.

Everything on the plate here was amazing. The wild rice was the Presidia ingredient, and it was really impressive. This is not actually a rice but a tall aquatic grass that is grown entirely wild and harvested in canoes by the Anishinaabeg tribe in Michigan. This grain, the only native grain to North America, comes in dark colors and has a subtle smokey and mushroom-like earthy flavor. You can read more about it here, and you can order it online here.

Amanda is still struggling with the concept of Slow Food.

Demolished.

Our dessert was pistachio di Bronte cannoli with figs.

The pistachio was the Presidia ingredient here. This pistachio is harvested in Sicily – more info about it is here. The cannoli was awesome, but I don’t particularly like figs. I want to like figs, I’m just not there yet.

So, around the time we were finishing off our desserts (and our bottle of Cabernet), an older guy comes in to sit at the bar in a black and yellow track suit. I’m not one to judge, but walking into a stuffy restaurant with a dress code in a track suit is a good way to get noticed. The bartender clearly knows him. Slowly, a couple younger guys arrive and join him at the bar (everyone else was appropriately dressed). They then start harmonizing, or trying to anyway. At this point there’s only one other couple at the table next to us in the whole of the dining area, so we’re now outnumbered by the would-be singers. It doesn’t take long before 5 of them have broken out into full song, with multiple harmonies. It actually would have been pretty impressive if any of them had been able to hold a note. Our best guess is that they were Georgetown University students and had run into a professor. It felt like being in a feel good Ivy league movie like Good Will Hunting or something out of St. Elmo’s Fire. As the evening wound to a close, Amanda and our dining neighbors (who we now felt much closer to, going through this experience together) gave their best American Idol judge impressions. I marinated with my Macallan, thoroughly amused.