noodsletter #.0019
Chicken soup
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You’ve received this email because you’ve signed up for noodsletter. Thank you. The recipe section is usually at the end, everything else on top. This week’s installment will be a little shorter. Just going to write out how I made this:
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Covid Chicken Soup
I got Covid, although it makes more sense to me, now, to say Covid got me. A “mild” case, which has been (continues to be?) pretty uncomfortable. I’m going to forego the usual list of links and such. Next installment will have even more clickable things than usual!
This one will just be about soup.
I’m sure you know how to make a chicken soup. It is likely one of the first things you ever learned how to make; it is easy; it is, invariably, good to eat. However, I’ve been making chicken soup this way for a while now, since the pandemic began essentially, and it’s relatively hands off, tastes quite good, but is also a little bit ridiculous. You can see how being cooped up in a house with nothing to do has determined the method; you’d only make chicken soup like this if you have a lot of time on your hands and you’re stuck in your house.
The method here is straightforward: make a basic stock, strain it, then use the stock to make a soup. Easy, yes? Relatively fast, too, if you have a pressure cooker. If you don’t, you can just simmer the stock on the stovetop.
Ingredients:
For the stock:
1 whole chicken
1 medium carrot
1 hefty stalk of celery
1/2 yellow onion
1 head of garlic minus two cloves
2-inch knob of ginger
1 bay leaf
10 sprigs of thyme
For the soup:
2 medium carrots
2 hefty stalks of celery (bonus points for stalks with leaves)
The other half of the yellow onion
2 cloves of garlic, minced and divided
2-inch knob of ginger, half grated, half peeled and left whole
1 bay leaf
5 sprigs of thyme
1 green onion, minced
Soy sauce
Salt
Ideally, you’d start with a whole chicken, cut it up into parts, skin the legs and breasts, debone the legs, and mince the leg meat. I actually wrote up how to do all this, but it wasn’t particularly clear (I’ve preserved it in this footnote so you can see what a mild case of covid does to the brain of a cooking newsletterer)1. If you don’t know how to do that, you can find resources online.
You can also just use about 2 lbs of chicken backs (you can buy these at the store) for the stock and just buy a pack of breasts and a pack of (boneless, if you like) chicken thighs and start with those instead.
Toss the chicken frame (or the chicken backs) and the wing tips (and the wings, if you aren’t using them for something else) and the skin from the chicken breasts and legs into the pot of a pressure cooker or a tall-side stovetop stock pot. If you aren’t going to use the legs for anything, you can throw them in, too, although if you want maximum flavor/gelatin extraction (technically gelatin isn’t extracted, but converted), you can use your knife to carefully cut up the legs a little bit to increase their surface area—a couple careful slashes down to the bone should do it (also separating them into thighs and drums will help).
To the pot with all the chicken parts, add water just until the parts are submerged. The amount of water you use will depend on the dimensions of your pot, but for something like a standard issue 6-quart pressure cooker, this will probably be around 4 liters/quarts, maybe less. That amount of water will produce a fairly gelatinous stock with this amount of chicken. Add all the stock vegetables; you can peel them, if you like (I do), but you don’t have to. The stock will just be darker if you don’t peel them.
Close the lid on the pressure cooker and cook for 1 hour at high pressure. Alternatively, if you’re just simmering it on the hob, bring to a boil over high heat, reduce to a steady simmer (steady stream of rising bubbles in the stock, about 208-10 degrees Fahrenheit) and cook for 3-4 hours.
Once the stock is cooking, generously sprinkle the skinless breasts with salt on both sides. Set them on a plate or sheet pan, cover, and put it in the fridge.
If you’re making meatballs, you can hand-chop the chicken leg meat or use a meat grinder or food processor. No matter which method you use, start by cutting the leg meat into half inch-wide strips. Place them on a plate or small sheet pan and put them in the freezer for 10-15 minutes. If you’re using a meat grinder, grind them on a coarse plate, then grind the ground meat again through the same plate (this will make the meat tackier and more well-mixed). If using a food processor, pulse them about 10-15 times (do not just process them), until it looks like coarsely ground meat; you do not want a puree. If using a knife, cut the strips crosswise into as small a dice as you can manager, then chop the diced meat repeatedly with a large knife, as if you were mincing herbs, until it’s got a semi-uniform consistency—you don’t want to go too crazy here as the benefit of hand-chopping meat is its inconsistent size of the meaty bits, which produces fun textures in the mouth.
Ground/chopped meat in hand, place it in a medium mixing bowl along with 1 of those cloves of garlic from the head, minced fine, 1-inch of ginger, peeled and grated, the sliced scallion, a good pinch of salt, and a splash of soy sauce. Using your hands, quickly work the seasoning into the meat just until well-mixed. If you used a meat grinder or a food processor try not to overmix, which will make the meatballs dense and bouncy (to be clear, neither of those are bad things in meatballs in certain contexts, just not this one). If you hand-minced the chicken, you’ll want to work the mixture kind of thoroughly, as the grain of the bits of meat will be a little larger and they’ll need that extra mixing to stick effectively to one another. Place a little marble sized ball of meat mixture on a plate, microwave for 15-20 seconds, and taste it for seasoning, adding more salt if it needs it (you want them a little on the saltier side). Cover and set it in the fridge.
You have some time to kill at this point, and I suggest chopping the remaining vegetables. Carrots into coins or half moons, celery into a large dice or cut on a bias to make those little celery ears, garlic minced, onion fine diced. The ginger you can just peel; I add it and fish it out at the end.
When the stock has cooked, train it into a 3-quart saucepan (there should only be about 3 quarts; the vegetables will absorb liquid; if there’s excess, pour it into a separate container and set it aside. Bring the stock in the saucepan to a boil. As it comes to a boil, take out the chicken breasts and briefly rinse the salt of their exterior. Add them to the boiling stock, cover with a lid, and turn off the heat. Let the breasts sit in the covered pot for about 45 minutes. At about the 45 minute mark, using an instant-read thermometer, check the temperature of the breasts in the middle of the thickest part; it should read about 155 degrees F. It might be a little over, like 160; even if it’s at 180 or something it won’t be terrible, but 155 is ideal. Remove the breasts to a plate to cool.
Bring the stock up to a steady simmer. Once simmering, using wet hands, form small meatballs with the ground chicken mixture; it should be easy to form into small balls, about the size of… a key lime or something. Small. Drop them into the simmering liquid as you form them. Once you’re done forming the balls, some of them will undoubtedly be ready to come out of the pot; if they float, they’re ready. Remove them to a plate.
In the original stockpot (now clean, please) or in another pot (like a Dutch oven), heat some oil/fat (chicken fat, olive oil, neutral oil…not butter) over medium high heat. Add the onions, season with a little salt, and cook until soft and translucent. Add the carrots and celery, and cook until it smells amazing, but not “brown.” Add the garlic and ginger, along with the remaining bay leaf and the thyme. Pour the stock in the 3 quart saucepan through a strainer into the pot with the vegetables, bring to a boil, reduce it to a simmer, and let it cook for about 40 minutes. Shred the chicken breast with your fingers while the soup cooks. When the soup’s cooked for 40 minutes, add the shredded chicken breast and meatballs. Season to taste with additional salt (it will likely need a fair amount of salt).
If you want to add cooked rice or cooked pasta to the serving bowls, you can do that if you like. Stir in some xo sauce or some sambal oelek and serve.
First, cut up the chicken into two breast halves, two legs, two wings, and the central frame. I do this by starting with the wishbone, cutting along the length of the wishbone on either of its exterior sides with the tip of a sharp knife, then using my hands to pull the thing out. Then I move to the legs, severing the skin that covers the cavity between breast and leg on either side, then folding the legs back so the ball in the ball-and-socket joint at the chicken’s hips on either side pops out. You can slide a knife through the opening created by the popped out ball joint and with quick mini cuts sever the legs entirely from the carcass. Set them aside (get them off the cutting board) then attack the breast: Using the tip of the knife, cut on either side of the obvious straight line of cartilage that separates either breast half. Move to the front of the breast, where it meets the shoulder, and make a small incision in the skin and through the flesh to sever the breasts from the area by the shoulder, then you can basically pull each breast half back and pull them off the rib cage (you can make small incisions along the base of the rib cage where it meets the spine to release the skin on either side to make it a little easier). Set the breasts aside (get them off the cutting board!), then cut the wings off the carcass by popping the balls out of their sockets, just like with the legs but folding them over in the opposite direction. You’ll be able to see the dislocated ball socket moving around under the flesh; make little cuts around the flesh to reveal the dislocated ball socket, and then cut through the flesh to release each wing. From there, if you’re just throwing the wings in the stock pot, you can stop; if you’re saving them for some other purpose, at least cut off the wing tips (same move as with the legs and the wings—bend the joint completely in the way it doesn’t want to bend, feel it pop, then cut the flesh around it to release it) since they are basically all collagen and that’s good for stock. If you are going to do what I did and use the leg meat to make meatballs, you will have to debone the legs. This is relatively simple to do. Turn the chicken leg skin side down on the cutting board. Find the central bone that runs through the thigh using your finger (this should be relatively intuitive if you’ve ever eaten a chicken thigh); using the tip of your knife, make an incision into the flesh above that line so you expose that central bone. Once exposed, continue making small cuts with the tip of the knife using the bone as a guide; you just want to separate all the flesh from the bone. At a certain point you will have to sort of dig your knife under the bone to separate the flesh from the bone under there; again, just use the tip of the knife, small, quick cuts. Once done, the meat should be attached to the bone only at the cartilaginous end that used to be attached to the carcass of the chicken, and at the cartilaginous end that connects to the drumstick. Using the tip of your knife, carefully cut the meat away from the end that used to be attached to the chicken.
Repeat the same process with the drumstick. This when you’ve separated the meat from the central bone, instead of trying to do a neat job freeing the meat entirely from the part that used to attach to the chicken’s leg, just sever the skin entirely a half inch up from where the ankle is…any meat you leave on there from that point down to the ankle will have a bunch of tendons, it’s quite tough, better to throw it in the stock pot.
At this point, the meat on the chicken leg is all attached to the bone structure only at what would be the knee, and you should be able to grasp both bones in your hand like one of those spring-loaded hand exercisers. Do that! Grip it, and squeeze, and then using the tip of your knife, make small, quick cuts to the flesh around the knob of the knee cap to free the chicken meat entirely. Toss the chicken leg bones in the stockpot, too.