So as some people have gathered from some of my contributions, I’m a home cook. Not up to Zenster’s or ** Fenris’s** standards, but I can shake a saute pan with the best of them, and have a decent knife callus.
I save chicken parts. More specifically, I boil a chicken a week for meat in sandwiches or on salads. I also buy chicken thighs in bulk, bone them out and use them in entrees. I’ve been saving carcasses, bones and skin for about three months now. I decided that it should be no more. So after roasting the bones, odds and ends of celery, carrots and onions that have been taking up a gallon-size Ziploc, I turned my attention to the skins. To the three pounds of frozen chicken skin.
Now I have chicken glace de viande simmering, chicken-rice soup on the make, and last, the fat. I am rendering three pounds of chicken skin to make schmaltz. Which shall be used in preparation of latkes, confits, any manner of Eastern European recipes, and (horror of horrors) sometimes eaten spread on dark rye with thin-sliced onions.
Schmaltz ahoy!
Why do you SAVE it?
Every time I cook a chicken, I throw the guts and skin and neckbone and gizzards and wingtips and trimmins into a shallow saucepan. Cover it with water and bring it to a boil. Turn it down and toss in whatever onion skins are at the bottom of the onion bin, and whatever parsley stems and scallion tops and carrot shavings I have on hand.
It just sits there and simmers on the back burner for an hour or four, and then I let it cool, strain it into a Tupperware, and refrigerate overnight. The next day I lift off the fat and put it in a small Tupperware for cooking purposes, then freeze the stock.
Then I have the stock around to make sauces, gravies, soups, whatever.
You don’t HAVE to make stock in enormous quantities, no matter what the cookbooks say. It’s cheap and easy to make in small batches.
And try making panfried potatoes in the fat. Instead of butter or olive oil. Nummers.
I save the bones, necks , etc. because I haven’t eaten dinner in two years, and it’s just me, the wife and the bunnies, and they won’t eat cooked food.
(Now, when I say I haven’t eaten dinner, I have consumed food at night, especially on trips or holidays. I just try not to eat anything after about 17.00, and I’ve maintained my weight better than when I was eating dinner. I taste sauces, try little tastes of what I’m cooking for my wife; which is my lunch the next day, but I don’t sit down to a plate od food.)
And besides, if I save it, I can make glace de viande as it’s meant to be. Five pounds of bones, necks and gizzards to two-three litres of water. Bouquet garni, Chinese celery, carrots and onion ends and skins for colour.
Ike, I’ve fried potatoes in schmaltz before, and it’s wonderful. Duck fat or Laurie Colwin’s goose-fat potatoes are better, though. And when the schmaltz is finished, there’s the griebenes. Chicken skin fried in it’s own fat. Heartburn city, baby!
If anyone’s interested, I’ll post the recipe for the chicken-rice soup, of which my hungover wife ate two bowls, then began vaccumming and rearranging the furniture.