How to make Chicken Stock~With Chef Frank

hi I'm chef Frank this is proto cooks and today we're making chicken stock what is chicken stock chicken stock is a base of so many different recipes that we use in the restaurant industry and for cooking it's a foundational skill that we teach students in culinary school it's something you need to know how to do well and there's so many people that do it poorly and this is something that I think is a chef you can be judged by or as a home cook I want to show to you that it's not that hard to do that you should be making your own chicken stock if you have leftover bones you should be making your own stocks a lot of people will ask what's the difference between a stock and a broth stock is made with bones it's generally a little thicker than a broth because the bones have a lot of connective tissue like cartilage and gelatin that kind of after a long time in the water will start to break down and it'll thicken your stock whereas a broth is usually made with meat stocks and broths are made with pretty much the same ingredients except for the fact that stocks are bones and broth is meat and the meat is kind of meant to be eaten with the broth stocks are never eaten by themselves they're not seasoned with salt broths are because they're basically something you're going to have as a meal or a starter to a meal let's talk about the ingredients I have two chickens worth of bones wings leg bones carcasses I have some yellow onions I think there's about four here some celery carrots bay leaves black peppercorns fresh thyme and parsley stems with the onions and the carrots we do about 50% onions and 25% carrots 25% celery it's called a mirepoix that is a standard ratio for making chicken stock so the bones I probably have about three or four pounds of bones and then I'm going to put in the pot with cold water the first thing we're going to do is put our bones into our pot and cover them with water okay people will always ask me or they'll say do you wash your chicken before you cook it I never washed chicken before I cook it and the reason for that is that it's contaminating your sink and you're kind of dripping chicken juice all over the place and by simply cooking the chicken or the chicken bones you are killing any bacteria germs that are on that chicken washing your chicken does not help at all just cook your chicken to the proper temperature okay so here is my bones they go right into the pot okay and then I'm going to put cold water over my bones cold water the reason I don't use hot water is there's a couple of reasons and one of the reasons is that I was told in school was that when you put hot water on bones it seals up the pores of the bones and you don't get as much extraction or flavor out of them it's probably a little less fat and more that when you take hot water out of your tap it has a little more lead in it and that's not good for anyone so cold water is the best you also want these bones to come up in the cold water that'll also kind of start to melt some of the fat and get some of the protein that we want to actually take out of the stock it'll give them more time to kind of render out so cold water bones okay I have about eight quarts here and I'm gonna put I'm gonna put all eight in there okay normally you just want to cover the bones but putting a little more water than you need in there is okay because this is going to evaporate we're never gonna put a lid on stock you don't want to put a lid on stock sometimes it helps not helps but sometimes what it's gonna do is that's gonna make it boil too rapidly the bones are gonna break up and you'll get a stock that some of the fat and the protein actually cooks back into and it makes it cloudy want a nice clear stock at the end so my water my bones I'm gonna turn this on okay and we're gonna bring this to a boil right you want to watch it bring it to a boil and then we're gonna lower it to a simmer so when it comes to a boil I'll show you what to do we have our bones and water in the pot and while we wait for them to come to a simmer we're gonna cut our vegetables I have my herbs and spices I'm gonna put them aside for now because we don't need them till later when it comes to stock making you're going to cut the vegetables according to how long this that's gonna cook when we do a chicken stock it only cooks for two hours maybe three at the most so we want to cut our vegetables a little smaller if you're doing a stock like a veal stock or a beef stock it cooks for over twelve to fourteen hours and you want to cut the vegetables a little bigger because you want the extraction of flavor to go a little slower we want the extraction of flavor to go a little faster so we're gonna cut our vegetables a little smaller so like I said I have two stalks of celery I am just gonna cut them in pieces I do wash my vegetables for this so my celery's cut into pieces you can see here that they're not that big they're not that small my character been peeled I'm gonna cut those into pieces and what's cool about this is you don't have to be too exact we're making stock all this stuff is gonna be strained out and kind of give up all its flavor now we're gonna cut the onions if you want to see other ways to cut onions I have a video on how to cut onions check it out but for this it's for stock and I'm probably gonna get a lot of hate mail for this or bad but I was taught in culinary school to leave the skins on for chicken stop I had a German teacher he said that you didn't have to throw the skins out that they lend a lot of color to the stock I have colleagues and friends that would disagree with that I have people that would agree with me but I'm just gonna quarter these onions and leave the skin on as long as they're not dirty it's okay so I have all my vegetables cut I'm gonna put these aside and we'll move on to the next step we gotta wait for the chicken stock to kind of come to a simmer and we got to do a few other things before I add the vegetables we have our bones in the pot we cover them with cold water and now I've brought them up to a simmer you can see this is bubbling away first thing I'm gonna do is I have a container and if you look at the stock there's a bunch of scum which is just basically protein that we don't want to boil back into our stock so what we're gonna do is a little bit of fat in here - what we're gonna do is we're gonna skim off the scum and if the teacher I had that taught me said skim the scum with a skimmer let the stock simmer so that's what we're gonna do we're gonna take off as much of this protein or scum and we're gonna let this simmer and basically this is trash you don't want to keep this this really doesn't have any any use I try to like - I try to take this come off because later on what I like to do is once the fat melts I like to try and save the chicken fat because chicken fat is great to use to cook a lot of different things I never want this stock to come to a boil either I want this stock to lightly simmer and bubble away if it's boiling what's gonna happen is is everything's gonna get broken up and we're gonna get a cloudy stock so now that I've skimmed it a few times has come to a simmer I'm going to add my vegetables or my mirepoix celery and carrots and onions okay I'm gonna let this cook for a little longer and then I'll add all my herbs and my spices I'll skim it throughout just to make sure there's nothing like floating around in there and we'll come back my aromatics or my vegetables have been in there for about a half hour and now I'm gonna add my herbs so my parsley stems go in my time goes in my bay leaves dry bay leaves go in and my black peppercorns go in sometimes if you do a soup and you're not going to strain everything you could tie all these herbs up and with some butcher twine and that's a setup that's a bouquet garni or you can put everything into some cheesecloth and that's a sachet but because I'm straining everything out of this eventually at the end I'm not too worried I just throw everything in you don't have to worry everything's getting strained out so you don't have to tie anything up and that's the idea here we're gonna let it go until it tastes good it's gonna be a little bland because we're not getting any salt to it but we're gonna let it go until it tastes good I'm gonna live happily similar way until it's ready and what it is will come back what I'm looking for as far as the taste goes is that it has some mouthfeel it has some body all that gelatin and connective tissue in the the bones have has melted so it'll feel a little kind of sticky it'll have some mouthfeel and feel a little dense it also has a very good chicken flavor I want to taste chicken with a slight bit of vegetables but not vegetables and chicken I want to taste chicken first so usually I'll let this go for about an hour and it'll have decent flavor stock is done or at least I think it's done let me taste really quick it's got some good body it's got good flavor my chicken is cooked all the way I'm gonna shut it off now I have my straining stuff I'm gonna see if there's any more fat that I can take off get the last of any sort of stuff that's on top get rid of that and now I'm gonna strain it okay I'm gonna strain this twice you don't have to strain it twice but I am gonna strain it twice so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my pot into this plastic jug clean my pot to get this ready to ice down because you have to ice this down and get it cold as fast as possible which I'm gonna show you but I'm doing a fair amount of stock here I'm doing about six quarts of stock because I'm making this for a long time and I'm gonna freeze most of it so you want to strain it I'm gonna strain it twice this is just to get the this is kind of a a decent mesh it's not super fine I'm gonna get all the big chunks out strain it into here wash my pot and then I'm gonna strain it through a fine mesh sieve so because I have such a huge pot a pot that my wife hates because it is huge most people gonna have this big of a pot you can always use a smaller pot and do a little less I'm just gonna take a smaller pot move this over and I'm gonna strain into my plastic jug and I'm gonna get as much as I can out you can do this over the sink if you don't want to make a mess normally I do it over the sink but it doesn't look so good on camera I've had people ask me well what do I do with those vegetables and the chicken bones and this and that you can feed this to your dog if the dog can have chicken bones but normally chicken bones aren't good for dogs you can also throw them away okay and not feel bad about that or compost them and not feel bad about it here's the thing if you've done this right the vegetables and the chicken bones have given up their flavor to the stock and they're useless to you now okay my pot in my big pot now and finish straining that you know I'll let it sit here for a moment or two with this I don't push it through I don't tamp it I don't do anything I just give it a little tap and now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bring this over to the sink strain it one more time into the pot and I sit down we're over at my sink and I'm gonna strain the stock a second time I have the pot that I cooked the stock in and I washed it out I have my stock here it's still hot and I have a finer mesh sieve so the first one had kind of large holes and the second one has smaller holes to get all the finer particulate out and I do this when I'm in the restaurant I do it from large hole to small hole every time so I'm gonna just pour this through and again like I said earlier you might not be making this much stock and that's okay you know you might make smaller amounts I make about six to eight quarts at a time because I have the big pot I have all the equipment for it you can make smaller amounts of this and that's okay the next important thing that I do here and this is from being non negotiable you have to ice down your stocks you have to get this as cold as possible as fast as possible so I'm gonna put my sink with uh puts ice water in my sake basically this is just ice that I buy at the local store and this is something we do at restaurants and when we teach our students is to ice large amounts of things down quickly I'll put some ice in my sink some cold water in my sink and I'm gonna bring it up to the level of the stock in the pot so the stock is about this much in my pot I'm gonna bring the ice water up to about that level maybe a little higher and I'm gonna swirl it around okay and get this cold really fast a lot of people will leave stuff on the counter and let it chill it's like the old grandma thing to leave stuff on the counter uncovered and chills thing this is the way I chill almost everything in the sink ice water and stir it occasionally so that it gets cold fast this is the best way to chill stuff and to ensure that you're not going to get sick and you'll see the reason why I've washed the pot here is because stainless steel or metal pots cool quicker than plastic I'll probably store it in my plastic jug but it'll take forever to cool in that plastic jug so I almost always cool in stainless or in my pot so what I do is I'll save all the bones and the skin and any leftover meat I have and I'll freeze it it's something that I do occasionally when I'm cooking I freeze the bones that I have I do this with pork I do this with beef anytime I have bones I freeze them until I have enough to make a stock so you know when you cut some chicken thighs and bone them out you might not have enough to make a stock so you just freeze them until you're ready to to have enough to make a batch of stock but like I said it's totally worth it okay so I get my ladle move my pot around there's a lot of times if you don't move your pot you'll see there's like a little layer of hot hot liquid around it okay so what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna keep this in the sink until the stock is cold not just barely warm or not barely cold but it should be cold and then I'll show you what it looks like I'll show you how I pack it up and we'll give it a taste just to recap this is what we've done we've made our stock we've tasted it we've strained it we've iced it down until it's cold and you can tell this is cold because you can see there's a little fat droplets on top that are getting solid and now what I'm gonna do is what I do is package it up this is my 8 quart container I get this in my restaurant supply store it's like 4 bucks it's from a company called cambro and that's what we use it's the industry standard just cambro so don't be afraid to buy things like this I use my restaurant supply store all the time from my home and it's great the other thing that I get at my restaurant supply store pints and I get quarts with lids these are called deli containers and these are great for packaging stuff up so I usually do these in pints and quarts but I'll just fill up my pints right make sure you get it all over the place like I normally do don't fill them up too much because when it freezes it expands and throw these in the freezer I usually label them with a marker and they stack really nicely okay and it's always you always have some stock there when you need it okay now that it's cold I taste chicken and that's what the most important thing is here is that I taste chicken first and then I get the kind of a background of vegetables there is still a little fat on here and if it sits in the fridge overnight you can peel that fat off it is not that difficult it takes a little time though so you have to commit to doing this because it takes some time I hope you enjoyed this we're gonna do tons more basic videos for chicken stock and different stocks and sauces I hope you enjoyed it give me a like give me a thumbs up I love to read people's comments I hope you guys are enjoying the videos I love doing them I'm chef Frank this is proto cooks have a good one [Music]

Channel: ProtoCooks with Chef Frank

Views: 73,372

Rating: 4.9798317 out of 5

Keywords: #stock, #foundations, #cambro, #cambromfg, #chefdaddy, #cheffrankproto, #chickenstock, #cooking101, #delicontainers, #cheffrank

Id: 2D-608HqNZA

Length: 16min 52sec (1012 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/solidwolf]

You can tell Frank is a professional educator. He does a good job of explaining why he does something rather than just saying to do it.

[u/emp_raf_III]

Does this mean he'll eventually upload a video where he shows us how to appropriately grass feed a cow to make high quality burgers?

[u/metagory]

Seems like a decent show. If I hadn't been exposed to him through Epicurious, I'm not sure I'd watch. However he has the platform now, so I'll prob tune in to see what he's up to.

[u/yourewrong321]

FYI, “epicurious” is also owned by Conde Nast yet they’re still uploading videos like nothing happened 🤡

[u/thetuque]

Who is Frank?

[u/MrsSeanTheSheep]

Subscribed because I love Frank so much (but I promise not in a creepy way)

[u/doomislav]

Love FRank!

[u/Tardcommander]

Perfect recommendation, thanks!

[u/Keepinitcaz]

Didn’t know this was a thing! Will definitely tune in.