Chicken Soup for the Parsimonious Soul

This post was inspired by Judy, who is a wonderful kosher cook. We had been discussing my prior post about the reasons I was not serving classic chicken soup for my Rosh Hashana dinner, when Judy announced that she not only never makes chicken soup, but she's not even sure how. While she may have been exaggerating a bit, I think this is an opportune time to discuss making chicken soup in a thrifty and time-saving way.

It's a good idea to always have some chicken stock in your freezer so that freshly made soup is only an hour away. There are two approaches to this. You can collect chicken (or turkey) carcasses in a bag in the freezer by simply putting them, along with any trimmings once you've carved your bird. The other approach, when you can't wait to stockpile enough carcasses to make stock is to buy chicken. But whatever you do, do NOT buy a whole chicken. It's painful for me to think of the waste, since the breast meat adds almost nothing to the stock, and boiling it renders it nearly useless for eating (unless you like mushy, bland,easy-to-chew protein). Instead, the key to great, rich stock is to make it from wings, which are loaded with gelatin. If your butcher happens to have some chicken bones that he's selling for under a dollar a pound, toss them into your stockpot as well.

Now, I can hear all of you mentally tuning out as you consider the Sisyphean task of cleaning the pin feathers off all those wings. Bear with me - you won't have to.

Rinse off your wings and any bones you're adding, and put them in your biggest stockpot. Add cold water and bring to a boil, then let the pot simmer for a few hours, skimming the scum off whenever you think of it. You will have an unappetizing mess of feathery, pallid wings in stock that you'd never consider feeding your family. Or so you think.

Let the pot cool, and fish out all the wings and bones and skin into a bowl. Refrigerate the bowl until its contents are cool enough to touch, and when you can, take out as many slivers of the wing meat as you want to add to the soup later. Toss the rest of the mess,and freeze the slivers of meat separately for future use. Meanwhile, take that fine mesh straining tool I wrote about in an earlier post and run it repeatedly through the stock. You won't believe what is trapped in there...all the pin feathers, for one. Rinse off the strainer after each time you dip it in the pot (doing this next to the sink makes sense). Then, as a final step, pour the stock through the large strainer and the result is the clearest, most golden rich stock you've ever made. Freeze this in individual containers until the day you want serve soup. It is so rich, it will gel.

Bring the stock to a slow boil in a soup pot, and add whatever you like to flavor it. Salt, for one. For my family, carrots and parsnips are a given. Yaakov always adds some savoy cabbage because he knows Deb loves it (me, too). I like leeks, and in the dead of winter, a bit of flanken doesn't hurt (although you'll have to
re-strain the scum caused by adding raw meat). Cook until the vegetables are cooked, and add some fresh chopped dill before you serve with matzo balls,or if you are lucky enough to be at Lea's, her homemade kreplach replace the matzo balls.

There you go; freshly made soup is always an hour away when there's inexpensively made stock in your arsenal.