chicken broth, soba

The roasted chicken from the previous post was broken down into useable meat to freeze in one pile and bones and everything else in another pile for stock. The roasted skin, tendons, and general debris was included with the bones. The bones were broken open with pliers to expose the marrow, ensuring it becomes incorporated 100% into the stock infusing it throughout the broth which chills to an aspic, or gelatin, if you like. It will be frozen and used as needed wherever commercial broth would be used. No herbs or aromatic root vegetables are to be included in this stock, as usually called for. Those things will be added later in individual dishes. In this way, the broth remains a blank slate, albeit an extremely chickeny flavorful one, upon which an infinite number of flavors can be written. Clever, in'nit?

Separating out the meat from the debris produced exactly two pounds of splendid chicken meat. That does not include the overly large breast already used in a previous meal. The bones and all the rest weighed a little over one and a half pounds. The mass of bones and debris was boiled in six quarts of water. The foam that forms initially when the water comes to a boil is denatured protein that tastes bitter when left to boil back into the water, therefore, given this opportunity, the foam is skimmed off. The photos below show the pot within the first few minutes of boiling with the foam on the surface. The third photo is an animation using the surface of the fourth photograph of the broth skimmed of foam overlaid upon the third photograph of the broth with protein foam on the surface. It's an attempt to make the difference between them a little more clear.  It's not all that clear because of boiling action looks much like protein foam. 




The pressure cooker is set to high because I want to brutally shove the marrow out of the bones. Generally, cooking chicken under pressure would call for a low setting, but there is no tender meat to concern us here. I wanted to go fast. When finished, it was also chilled quickly by dousing the entire pot and lid with cold water. I let the sink fill up and surround the pot so that the lid could be removed safely, otherwise, it would explode open spraying high pressure heated broth all over myself and the kitchen. Don't ask me how I know this. There was no need to fuss around doing things the slow way. The chicken was run through a colander into another pot then run through a sieve back into the original pot.

Chilling will allow the oil to separate from the broth and become firm on the top. The fat forms a hardened disc that's different from the broth that gels underneath it. The fat-disc can then be lifted off easily and discarded. But before that, whatja say we give it a test drive -- how about a bowl of soba?

Soba originally referred to thin buckwheat noodles, but recently it has come to mean any thin noodle distinguished from udon which is thick noodles. My soba noodles are egg noodles made from 100% semolina, a hard duram wheat, yellow in color. As usual, I went overboard because I'm always so afraid I'm not gonna get all mah nourishments.

Not pictured separately, because I couldn't be arsked:

* the last of the collard, cut into small squares
* mushrooms sliced
* sweet peas sliced through
* chicken bits from the roasted cicken

Then three herbs and one aromatic were added.

* rosemary
* cilantro
* parsley
* green onion







I suppose I could have called this chicken noodle soup, but I added soy sauce, and I'm feeling a little bit Japanese right now. Plus, I read this page on instructables.com written by some uber-goof on how to make your own Ramen. Odd, I thought, considering Ramen is a trademarked name and not the name for a type of noodle, and who would want to replicate that? The author goes on to describe how to make ordinary egg noodles using AP flour, and that comprises the whole of the insructable. The instruction falls apart when he get to describing how to make a broth. He admits he could use a little help there himself, just go ahead and use one of the flavor packets that comes with Ramen. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. What a marooon. Those flavor packets are so gross it makes my jaws hurt just thinking about it. This, up there, was heavenly. The rosemary was especially intriguing, a haunting pine flavor that's decidedly non-Japanese but which the Japanese would fully appreciate.