Chicken and Stock!!!
This weekend I got some meat from Stillman's Turkey Farm: oddly, no turkey, but I did get hot Italian lamb sausage, pork chops, and a whole chicken.
I roasted the whole chicken today using this simple recipe, and substituting two limes for a lemon. It came out amazing. I ate, literally, half the bird for dinner (that's about two pounds of chicken). One of the best things about locally sourced chicken from small farms is that you don't have to worry about salmonella so much, so you can cook the chicken to an internal temperature of about 150 and be okay: I vastly prefer this because otherwise the chicken is just too dry for me to enjoy. Anyway, after carving the rest, I'm currently making some chicken stock out of the carcass.
Folks, I finally took Michael Ruhlman's advice when making chicken stock, and let me say he is god damned right: keep the stock at 170 degrees while cooking. I have never had a stock come out this clear and clean. Wow. (For reference, 170 F is not even simmering a tiny bit. It's just unpleasantly warm.) Three hours at 170 for the carcass, which I have since removed and added my aromats (leeks, celery, carrots, parsley, peppercorns: no onions because I love the leeks so much). Again, per Ruhlman, only keeping the aromats in there for about thirty or fourty minutes since (a) that's enough to get the flavor out of them and (b) if they get mushy they cloud up the stock.
I would have pictures for you except I'm still waiting for my camera to come in the mail. Once that happens, though, expect a lot of food pics on this LJ.
I roasted the whole chicken today using this simple recipe, and substituting two limes for a lemon. It came out amazing. I ate, literally, half the bird for dinner (that's about two pounds of chicken). One of the best things about locally sourced chicken from small farms is that you don't have to worry about salmonella so much, so you can cook the chicken to an internal temperature of about 150 and be okay: I vastly prefer this because otherwise the chicken is just too dry for me to enjoy. Anyway, after carving the rest, I'm currently making some chicken stock out of the carcass.
Folks, I finally took Michael Ruhlman's advice when making chicken stock, and let me say he is god damned right: keep the stock at 170 degrees while cooking. I have never had a stock come out this clear and clean. Wow. (For reference, 170 F is not even simmering a tiny bit. It's just unpleasantly warm.) Three hours at 170 for the carcass, which I have since removed and added my aromats (leeks, celery, carrots, parsley, peppercorns: no onions because I love the leeks so much). Again, per Ruhlman, only keeping the aromats in there for about thirty or fourty minutes since (a) that's enough to get the flavor out of them and (b) if they get mushy they cloud up the stock.
I would have pictures for you except I'm still waiting for my camera to come in the mail. Once that happens, though, expect a lot of food pics on this LJ.