Cooking Clear Soup or Stock

I discovered chef, Jaques Pepin, while reading a question answered on Quora.  If you would like to boil clear soup or stock watch him in this video.  

Here are some tips I picked up from watching this video:

-start boiling the chicken (meat) with cold water so the scum (solidified gelatine from the bone) from it will come to the top.
-do not cover pot while soup is boiling as it will become cloudy.
-remove the scum with a little skimmer during the first 10 minutes of boiling the soup. 
-push fat with ball of laddle and skim it out.
-season soup (he used bay leaf, thyme, black peppercorn, rosemary, and clove).
-reduce heat to simmer soup for 35 minutes.
-turn off heat and let it cool down.
-remove chicken to remove skin and debone it.
-put the bones back into the soup to cook further for 1 hour.
-strain the soup to remove bones and fat by putting a paper towel or two in the strainer.
-you can also keep it in the fridge overnight so that it is easier to remove the cogealed fat.
-wipe pot clean with a paper towel and pour strained soup back in.
-add vegetables to soup to boil for only 20, 25 minutes (he used leak, onion, carrot, butternut squash, mushroom and cabbage).

You can reduce your salt in take in the soup by bringing the flavor up with:

-dry spice like hot pepper, fennel seed, oregano, thyme, rosemary, etc.

-fresh seasoning like onion, parsley chopped, scallion, garlic, the rind of lime and the rind of lemon, cilantro, tarragon, ginger, etc.

-sweet like honey or maple syrup mixed with sour like vinegar, tomato or lemon.
-crystallized the top of meat or fish by heating it on very high heat.

The tips can be applied for making Chinese soups too.

How to Cut Up a Whole Chicken to Store

How should you cut a whole chicken and store it in the fridge?  The best instruction I have seen so far is from Walk To Eat because other than photos, the blogger had also shared a video of the process.  However, before I proceed, I will do what my mother taught me to do and that is to give the whole chicken a good rub down with coarse salt first before I wash it off.  The salt can kill some bateria, so it will remove any smell there is on your chicken.

If you follow through with his instructions, this is how your chicken will be parted.  I have drawn red lines on the parts to show how I would cut them up into smaller portions for my soup or dishes.  

I will cut each drumstick and wings into three sections and the carcass into two sections.  These are parts from the chicken that I will pack together in a container for boiling soup with:

1) chicken feet
2) the bony parts of the chicken, like the stumps and wingtips

3) the joints from the drumsticks 
4) the carcass

By storing them together, it will be easier to take them out from the freezer when it is time for me to boil my soup.  You can see from his video for making Basic Chicken Soup that the blogger used a whole chicken to make it.  This was exactly how I used to boil soup which is wasteful for a small family if you do not eat the chicken meat.

You can learn how I make my ABC soup which is rather similar to what he is making, except that I prefer to use pork soup bones to flavour my soup.  

The reason why I steam the frozen pork over the soup is to:

-save time on thawing it.
-get rid of the scum.

The Chinese traditional way to get rid of the scum is to pour hot water over the soup bone.  However, I discovered that once it is boiling in the soup, more scums will appear which I will have to remove. 

This is how I would like my pork soup bone to look like when it is ready to be added to the soup to continue boiling.

Marinating the soup bone with salt before boiling it in the soup makes it tasty.  So, the meat on it will more likely be eaten than discarded.  You can read about the additional ingredients I used in making this soup to change its flavour or use it as a soup stock to cook other dishes at the following link:

Do you like soup? If so, what is your favorite soup?

This is another way to cut your chicken if you want to debone it.