make a large batch of stock), or find them in most
supermarkets at a bargain rate. But wings will do just fine if
you can’t get your hands on carcasses.
So we now know that for the optimum broth, we need two
things: extraction of flavorful compounds from within
muscle fibers (as indicated by the broths produced from
chicken meat) and the extraction of gelatin from connective
tissue to provide body. The question is, is there any way to
speed things up a bit?
Well, I knew that chicken muscles look like long, thin
tubes, and that extracting flavor from them is about slowly
cooking them to extract their contents, much like squeezing
a toothpaste tube. The degree to which those tubes are
squeezed is dependent upon the temperature to which the
chicken is brought, but the rate at which those flavors come
out is also dependent upon the distance they have to travel
from the interior of the muscles to the stock. So, I wondered,
would shortening the length of those tubes hasten the flavor
extraction process?
I cooked three stocks side by side using chicken carcasses
chopped to different degrees and found that indeed it does
make a difference. Chopped carcasses gave up their flavor
far faster than whole carcasses, and throwing roughly
chopped chicken pieces into the food processor and finely
grinding them worked even faster, producing a full-flavored
broth in just about 45 minutes. It ain’t pretty, but hey, it
works!
nandana
(Nandana)
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