Hello and welcome back to The Stone Soup Cook–I’m so glad you’re here!
This week, I’m going to be continuing to indulge my inner squirrel by preparing foods and storing them for later use. Today I’m featuring chicken stock.
Regular readers will already know how much I love to roast a chicken for dinner. After roasting, I almost never just toss a chicken carcass. Instead, I simmer it for a long time with aromatics, such as onions, bay leaves and garlic, sometimes some ginger, and other vegetables. The addition of an acid (I like to use preserved lemon paste or just plain lemon juice) helps to break down the collagen in the bones and joints, resulting in a viscous, tasty broth that can be used for soup that night, or stored away in the freezer for use in soups, stews, risottos or the like in the future. I almost always have a quart or more on hand in my freezer for use at a moment’s notice.
Click here for a recipe for chicken stock:
Today, I’m also tackling the question that has plagued mankind ever since the first Costco opened its doors more than 40 years ago: to buy rotisserie or to roast at home? Honestly–there are compelling arguments for both. Let me explain:
We’ve all been there–you’re hungry and you walk into the grocery store and there it is: the hot food kiosk at the grocery store entrance, with its array of sexy, hot food dazzling your senses with rich, buttery, salty smells and just screaming: “Pick me! Pick me! I’m delicious and there’s NO WAITING!” Trust me–that uncooked chicken in the cold meat section isn’t calling your name–at most, it’s saying “you want a piece of this? you’re gonna have to work for it, honey.”
So what’ll it be? I almost always opt to roast a fresh chicken at home because I’ve got the time. But for a lot of folks with a family to feed and no time on their hands, the grocery store rotisserie chicken and a bag of salad is a great alternative. While many of the chickens are injected with flavorings and additives, they are way better for you than a bag of fast food from McDonald’s. And they’re usually a loss leader to get you in the store to buy other things, so they’re a great deal–Mr. Costco figured this out a LONG time ago, setting up fragrant hot food kiosks at the entrance of the store where he sold little rotisserie chickens for about five bucks a piece to hungry families. And here’s the best part: they’re pretty darned tasty!
But are they good for everything? Well…let’s talk about that.
This last weekend, I bought a couple of rotisserie chickens from my local Safeway because I was in a time crunch and had committed to making chicken salad for a shared picnic in the park with another family. I picked them up in the morning, chilled them up in the fridge during the day and made really tasty chicken salad for the picnic in the evening. I stripped the remainder of the chicken off the bones the next day and have been using the meat cold in salads and shredded in scrambles for a quick breakfast with a piece of toast. So that’s the upside of rotisserie chicken.
Here’s the downside of rotisserie chicken: they’re great if you can get them home piping hot and serve them for dinner immediately, and/or use them as an additive or a cold meal down the road. They’re not so great when heated up. If you miss that window of opportunity and have to heat them back up, they can be very dry. And there’s another downside that I learned just yesterday: they don’t make great chicken stock.
But why? In a word: fat.
When a chicken is roasted on a spit, the chicken’s fat drips through and out of the bird. In a commercial setting, or on the streets of Paris, you can see rotisserie chickens rotating in large ovens with layer after layer of chickens one on top of the other. The idea is that the chickens drip their prodigious layers of fat over top of one another as they roast, thus basting each layer of chicken as they rotate. This is a great way of cooking a chicken for immediate consumption, but all that tasty fat then drips away and gets discarded at the end of the process–or at least it doesn’t come home with you. And therein lies the problem with making chicken stock with the store-bought rotisserie chickens.
When you roast a chicken at home, all that gorgeous fat melts away from the bird during roasting, but then gets caught in the roasting pan for use later. That fat is super-flavorful and can be used to fry potatoes (which are particularly yummy when fried in the leftover chicken fat, or even during the roasting process), to fry vegetables or to make a gravy for the chicken or mashed potatoes. But probably the best thing you can do with it is use it when making chicken stock. And the beauty of using it for the chicken stock is that you capture all that glorious flavor in the chicken stock and then scoop most of the fat away at the end of the process–I always leave just a little to give the stock a little body.
Like the good pioneer I aspire to be, last night, I used the two chicken carcasses from the rotisserie chickens to make chicken soup. The resulting broth was bland and lackluster. I ended up adding a couple of cubes of bouillon to it just to give it some flavor, and then I thought “what was the point of all that time and energy simmering the chickens?”
So, friends–here’s the verdict, and I’m pretty sure it won’t be a surprise: I’ll be continuing to roast my own chickens in the future, but I’ll never cast aspersions on anyone’s choice to buy a rotisserie chicken–I only warn that the resulting stock will disappoint.
Tune in tomorrow for more squirrel indulging.
Until then,
Peace, love and good food,
Keri
