MIDWEEK MACRO: CHICKEN
a rice bowl, a buffalo chicken leg and a good stock.
Welcome back to How I Cook+.
Three recipes for you this week, all using chicken, all very tasty. First up a little bit of chicken stock and pressure cooker theory and then two healthier, more midweek-macro style recipes for your arsenal. Let’s get into it.
CHICKEN STOCK 101
Good quality chicken stock is a quiet overachiever in the kitchen. It doesn’t demand attention like truffle, caviar or saffron, yet without it, your soup tastes like a warm puddle regret. Fresh water, simmered slowly with bones, meat, vegetables, and a bit of patience, performs culinary alchemy, humble scraps transforming water into liquid gold. A splash can rescue bland rice, give risotto its swagger, and make sauces feel like they went to finishing school. Thanks to magic of gelatin, a good stock adds body and silkiness no knorr stock pot or chalky foil-wrapped cube can convincingly fake. Best of all, it’s thrifty and sustainable. In short, chicken stock is less an ingredient and more a secret weapon. On this newsletter and in my book, I regularly call for a dose of good quality chicken or beef stock, a hangover from my time spent behind the restaurant stoves. There was always a gigantic pot blipping away on the back of the stove, ticking over, a sort of soupy, flavour-crutch that props up the food offering. A true kitchen essential.
So, with all of that in mind, why on earth don’t more people make it at home? I think it boils down to space, time and money. Time is an obvious one, good stock takes time and time is money. Spend a few quid on a pressure cooker and you can make a blinder of a stock after work in 60 minutes. Problem solved. This stock recipe today uses a 6L pressure cooker, a nearly whole chicken and a packet of wings. It’ll yield 2.5L of intensely flavourful stock that’ll be useable across 3-4+ meals. It’ll freeze well and will sit in the fridge happily for a week. Space? No excuse.
Oftentimes when I ask people to buy meat specifically to make stock, they see it as a waste of money. “What do you do with the wings after the stock has been made?”, the answer to this question is; nothing. To make good stock, you have to start with good, whole ingredients. Think of stock making as a flavour exchange, the flavour in the chicken wing leaves the meat and bone and into the water. Once strained off, the meat really has nothing left to give. This isn’t a “waste”, you’ve simply transferred the flavour potential to your stock, and a good stock is worth its weight in gold.
Stocks are endlessly customisable. Changing up the ingredients will yield different texture, colour and of course flavour. Herbs, spices, wine, vegetables, sometimes fruits are added to manipulate the final product. It can get pretty complex, and the longer the ingredient list the higher the deterrent for the home cook. The goal today is to make a fairly neutral, but intensely delicious pure chicken stock that can be used across a whole heap of different recipes.
WHY USE A PRESSURE COOKER?
I cannot believe it took me this long to buy a pressure cooker. For the uninitiated, a pressure cooker is a sealed cooking pot that uses steam pressure to cook food faster than a regular pot or dutch oven. It works on the simple scientific that when water is heated in a closed container, the steam it produces cannot escape, so pressure builds. As the pressure increases, the boiling point of water rises above the familiar 100°C. This means the water and steam inside the cooker can reach higher temperatures, allowing food to cook more quickly.