Yeah, it’s early, but I’m making turkey soup today. Well, technically I’m just making the stock, but you know what I mean. I’ll be spending the real Thanksgiving with friends, so I roasted my Turkey yesterday to make sure I had enough leftovers for myself and a nice carcass for stock.
Big pot, turkey carcass, 3 carrots, 4 stalks of celery with the leaves, 2 onions, 2 bay leaves, salt, pepper, rosemary, water to just cover it all. Bring to a boil, skim the scum (I actually didn’t have any this time), and then simmer for 4 hours
It’s been simmering for about an hour now and the whole house smells of turkey goodness. 3 more hours to go before I strain, refrigerate over night, and then skim the fat off a day or two later.
Leftover Turkey Soup is the only reason I don’t just skip the turkey on Thanksgiving.
I made some stock yesterday, in preparation for the gravy; there’s never enough pan drippings for our family’s gravy intake. Smells so good.
My dimwit husband, gods bless him, dutifully followed my instructions to get some “turkey bits, legs, necks, wings, whatever’s cheap, just not smoked”. Turkey bits the weekend before Thanksgiving: $3.99 a pound. :eek: Turkey: 29cents a pound.
“Why didn’t you just get another small turkey?!”
“'Cause they’re all frozen.”
:smack: Nothing stays frozen long in a pot of boiling water! Oh well. I’ll enjoy my $8 a gallon turkey stock anyhow. And on Friday, it will become Turkey Soup, along with the stock I get from the turkey carcass.
I love turkey, and love having leftovers, but honestly… I like the soup better. My grocery store routinely sells bags of chicken parts for soup, but not turkey. One of these days I’ll ask one of the butchers if he can make me a bag-o-turkeyparts…
Turkey bones are all collapsing on themselves in the stock now. Yum.
OP sounds like a good recipe and method. I’d maybe add some thyme and white wine to it. When I make the actual soup, I add fresh onion, carrot and celery, and ladle it over precooked rice or noodles and some freshly chopped herbs. Gives you that blast of flavor from the herbs and you don’t have soggy starches.
Noodles! My favorite are homemade egg noodles cut in fettucini shape. It’s a bit of work, but I have one of those hand cracked pasta rollers, so it’s not too bad. I may put the motor on my Wish List one of these years, though.
Aldi has a nice German spaetzle noodle that’s really good, too. It’s got a rough texture and a bit of chewiness in it that stands up to turkey soup well.
Like **Chefguy **says, it’s preferable to cook the noodles separately and add the soup to them in the bowl - but I like the taste of noodles cooked in stock, so I save some stock to cook my noodles in, and then freeze that starchy stock for making rice or risotto dishes later, or even for starting my next batch of soup. The starch thickens the liquid part of the soup just a little bit, which is not a bad thing.
I prefer flat egg noodles, but that’s probably because my mother made it that way. I haven’t done barley, but I think that would be delicious, too. Rice seems a little too wimpy for turkey stock to me. Turkey stock is much richer than chicken stock. If I did rice, I’d probably do wild rice.
Interestingly, I was thinking about adding some white wine this time. And I was going to add some rosemary and thyme. It’s not too late!
OTOH, it’s looking like I added too much water, so I think I’ll simmer uncovered for the last 30 minutes.
So your 16-lb. turkeys cost less than five bucks? Inconceivable! I had to check the date on this thread to make sure it wasn’t a zombie from the 1960s.
Anyway, I had the same issue with the price of turkey parts this year. Why the hell are necks so expensive? I’ll admit they’re my favorite part of a turkey because I like to suck the meat off of them after I make the broth. Along with the boiled onion it makes a righteous breakfast on Thanksgiving Day.
So after being burned by a neckless bird last year, I was planning on buying a couple of scrawny necks until I discovered that at four bucks a pound they would cost as much as the whole turkey. So I took my 59-cent bird and moved along. I found some tremendous necks at another butcher shop for “only” $1.59 per pound, which I happily paid. As a bonus, only one neck was enough because it looks like it came out of an ostrich. It might be all the turkey I need to eat come Thursday.
As others have said, turkey stock is the reason for the season.
This year I paid a premium price for an organically raised, free range turkey. I want to see if it really is better tasting than the ordinary birds. Wish me luck.
Loss leader at the supermarket. I think there may have been a $50 minimum purchase to get that rate or something. Yeah, cheapest part of the meal per pound. Cheaper than the bread for the stuffing!
It doesn’t become me to brag, but we celebrated Thanksgiving last weekend (I live in Germany, and it delights me to celebrate early so that I have that much more time between the holidays. Bonus: I’m not a bit irked at all the Christmas decorations and foodstuffs that can be found everywhere now) and I turned the carcass into the best turkey stock I have ever made, ate turkey soup three meals in a row, and froze 4 separate containers of stock to get us through the winter. Hot dog!
And yup, the turkey soup is pretty much 87% of my motivation for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s my very favorite food ever.
ETA: GAH, how did I post without the most important point? Egg noodles all the way, people!
Barley. I’m telling you guys, nothing beats mushrooms and barley in turkey soup. Try it, and I’ll bet you never go back to noodles or rice. The barley stays firm, and adds a slight nuttiness.
Gladly! The carcass goes into my biggest pot, bought specially as a turkey stock pot, along with carrots (I threw in all the carrots we had on hand this year, so about 6 big ones and a bag of baby carrots), celery (again it was all we had on hand, which was almost a full stalk including the leaves), two onions, several bay leaves, and 15-20 peppercorns. I usually put in an apple as well, but it was Sunday and the stores were closed and I didn’t feel like waiting until the next day, so. Cover it all with water (or at least to the point that only the tallest part of the carcass is poking up) and then bring to a simmer. I always simmer at least 6 hours; this year it worked out to just over 7. The other twist this year is that when it was finished it was way late and I was too tired to wait until it was cool enough to strain the solid bits out, so I left it on the stove with the heat off and the cover on and then did that first thing in the morning. It was still quite hot then, so I’m reasonably sure I’m not going to kill my family with food poisoning, so that’s good. I strained it and stored the broth in several large containers (and one smaller to have for dinner that night). After refrigerating for a number of hours in one case and overnight in the other cases, I skimmed the fat from the surface. I wait to add salt and poultry seasoning to the broth at the point that I’m heating it to a boil to make the actual soup.
So, so much flavor this year! I look forward to this process every single year and get such satisfaction from it. I’ll break out one container of broth the next time the family is all home and then periodically through the dark months, particularly if someone gets sick.
Egg noodles hold up best to the broth, I find, and while I love the extra flavor they have when they’re cooked in the broth, I often cook them separately so as to keep them from absorbing precious broth and so that they don’t get gloppy if we don’t eat everything in one meal.
My husband likes to sprinkle a strong mountain cheese like Emmentaler into his soup, but the poor man grew up without turkey soup, so what does he know?
shantih, your recipe looks very familiar, but you sure do use a lot of produce! When you say a “whole stalk” of celery, do you mean a whole head? I always worry that adding too much celery leaf will make my stock bitter. It would be great if I’m mistaken about that.
I think a few garlic cloves, a pinch or two of dill and a smidge of coriander add even more tongue-teasing depth. My “recipe” is a rummage through the fridge and spice cabinet. It always tastes like turkey soup, but I’ve never made the same soup twice.
Regarding safe handling, I’ve always assumed that hours of simmering sterilize the contents. Storing a covered pot overnight outside of the fridge can’t possibly be a problem, can it?
If it’s at a rolling boil for >15 minutes (I think? Not sure of the number) then it’s essentially autoclaved - as long as no air enters. My lids aren’t exactly airtight, but I wrap a layer of plastic wrap around them and call it a night. So far, we’re not dead.
Really, I don’t know what else to do. The Food Police tell me not to put a huge pot of Hot Stuff in the fridge, as that will quickly raise the temperature above safe levels for everything in the refrigerator. I don’t have a cooler big enough to pack enough ice around my stock pot to quickly lower the temperature. I don’t have a blast chiller like a restaurant. So…meh? I figure I’ve done the best I can, and the small risk of contamination is why we have immune systems.
I think the Food Police on our side on this one. After all, long before a whole turkey even approaches the temperature of simmering soup stock, they expect us to eat it!
Bah, I did indeed mean head, not stalk. I should have used the scientifically correct designation of “thing” of celery.
I couldn’t even tell you what each element adds to the stock, since this is the way I’ve done it forever after watching my father do it this way forever, and I only get it once a year, and if I subject it to the scientific method and leave out one element and take notes on the flavor, that means I’d be getting substandard turkey broth at some point, and life is just too damned short to risk that. I do know that the carrots add sweetness and some color to the broth, but that’s as far as my analysis goes.
I don’t know that the simmering actually sterilizes the stock, but as long as it’s strained while it’s still at least very warm and then refrigerated as soon as each container reaches room temperature, it must be okay, right? I mean, I always bring the broth to a rolling boil for a number of minutes when I make it into soup, and I figure that gives the kibosh to any bacteria lurking around.
Other than the amount of produce, your recipe is just like mine.
The longer you leave any food unrefrigerated, the higher the likelihood of it being contaminated. But since you’re boiling again before eating, I think it’s OK.
