The most flavorful, full-bodied chicken stock takes hours to make on the stove — usually. Here’s a shortcut that doesn’t compromise on quality: add packets of unflavored gelatine to your stock ingredients and have stock in less than an hour.
Photo by Juan-Calderon.
In his massive and highly informative new book, The Food Lab, Serious Eats’ J. Kenji Lopez-Alt explains that chicken stock gets its body and texture from the chicken’s connective tissue. When heated up, the collagen in the connective tissue turns into gelatine, but it’s a chemical process that takes hours.
Kenji’s scientific shortcut? Add packaged gelatine to finely ground chicken carcasses (specifically, chicken backs and wing tips pulverized in a food processor) and your other standard chicken stock ingredients, such as water, onions, celery.
45 minutes of cooking plus the time to skim off excess fat, and you’ve got a rich, flavorful chicken stock that would fool anyone into thinking you cooked it for hours.
I tried it this weekend and it was the quickest way I’ve ever made homemade chicken stock and soup.
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