Matzoh ball soup, one of my top five
favorite foods. It was, I mean I think even before I had a bottle in my mouth, I
was sipping on matzoh ball soup. And there's no better time of year to be
having it then now, as the Passover season is upon us, although I make this
soup at least once a month and there's nothing better than that essential
Jewish penicillin. A great chicken soup and no better dumpling to have with it
than a classic matzoh ball. First thing we want to do is make our matzoh balls, so I want to whip my egg whites. I'm going to add a pinch of cream of tartar that's
gonna help stabilize our egg whites. One of the things about matzoh balls is there are two different types: there are heavy dense sinkers, and then there are
floaters. I happen to be a floater guy and to make good floaters
you gotta get air into those balls. And the best way to do that is separate some
of my eggs and make some beaten egg whites to fold into our mixture. It's
starting to hold some soft peaks; just refers to the stiffness of the beaten
egg whites. We have a nice, stiff egg white and you see that right there? That would be a
stiff peak. So we're just gonna set those aside. Into our bowl here we have our garlic and onion powders, baking soda, baking powder, some salt, my egg yolks. Some whole egg. Little bit of pepper. I'm going to combine those elements. I have my schmaltz, rendered chicken fat, minced onion, our egg white and our matzoh meal. I'm just gonna gently fold this together. The matzoh meal is going to absorb all of
those liquids. Cut a piece of saran. Take it and push it down on to the mixture
itself, all you want to do is prevent a dry skin from forming on top of your
matzoh meal. There we go it's gonna take about a
half-hour, forty five minutes for the matzoh meal to absorb all the liquid. You can store
it even up to 24 hours and you're not gonna see any problem with it whatsoever,
so you can do this the day in advance if you like. I have some chicken broth right here but I want to make really, really, strong chicken soup. I'm actually going to poach my whole chicken. We're just going to place this into our hot broth. When
it reaches a boil we're going to turn it down to maintain a simmer, cover it and let it cook for an hour, hour and 10 minutes until that chicken is done. That's beautiful. I think we're done here. Nice wide spoon into the cavity of the
bird, don't worry about quarters or wings falling off, super easy to pick those up,
put them in to our bowl, let that cool. Here we have our broth for our chicken soup. I'm going to add my onion, carrot and celery. Rutabaga lends a really nutty, sweetness to this, it's a great vegetable. Next thing that we want to do: our chicken
meat. Now usually when I'm making chicken soup, I'll just peel away pieces of the
chicken and just drop those back in there to cook for the final half an hour
with our dumplings and with our veg. Add a couple sprigs of parsley and a few sprigs of dill. So now we have the meat from half a chicken, all those vegetables,
the double chicken stock that's now a really rich chicken broth. We have our
matzoh batter here. I have some vegetable oil for my hands, because this stuff can be sticky. And all I'm going to do is gently roll some small matzoh balls
because they're going to expand, almost double in size. We'll come back to that in 20-25 minutes and those should be done. Told you those would double in size. Shallow
bowl, New York Jewish deli style. I'm kind of a two ball person. A little bit of
dill on there. Take a little bit of leftover parsley. Show you what this presentation can look like, sometimes nice in a larger deeper bowl. Let me show
you something else. Look at how perfect those are. How light they are, that air that's still in there which is why they float and, quite frankly, is why you can just eat 400 of these.
