Yesterday I made the Everyday Chicken and Ginger Stock recipe from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. This was in preparation for the Egg Drop Soup recipe.

The stock is simple: simmer chicken parts with ginger, scallions, and white peppercorns for an hour and a half. My chicken was too big to stay submerged, so I flipped it every now and then.

The stock is then strained through a fine-mesh sieve.

I found this interesting from the introduction

As with Western-style stocks, the more connective tissue and skin your chicken has on it, the more gelatin you'll extract and the richer your stock will be. Meanwhile, the more meat you leave on the bones, the more flavor your stock will have. Oftentimes what I'll do is buy a whole chicken, remove the breast meat for stir-fries, then save the carcass, wings, and legs for broth. After the broth is made, you can pick the meat off the legs to use for soups or salads.

I knew bones were important for the gelatin and texture, I didn’t know meat was important for chicken-y flavor. I like his suggestion to use a whole chicken, save the raw breast meat for later, and pick and save the cooked dark meat, too. That’s exactly what I did.

I left the carcass together except for the legs, which I removed for easier picking at the end, and the breasts which I removed at the very beginning. Next time I intend to go ahead and break down the whole bird to save more breast meat by including the ribs and to get more surface area for the bones in the stock.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.