The Mystery du Jour
Saturday, March 7, 2009 at 11:50AM The lady and I love roasting chickens. They're efficient -- we can use almost every part of the bird somehow or another. The meat is great at time of cooking, and later for sandwiches. I love cooking with schmaltz. And the carcass, sad-looking and well picked-over, goes in a baggie in the freezer. Every time we have three or four of them, we do as we did yesterday and make stock.
I've a good head for numbers, and this one isn't too hard. I put six pounds of assorted chicken into a pot with three pounds of mirepoix, a sachet d'epis of negligable weight and volume, and two gallons -- that's eight quarts -- of water. Water is lost at almost every step: as vapour during simmering; in with the schmaltz during skimming; in the soggy mass of bones and veggies suring straining; in the cheesecloth during second-straining; and in little dribbles and spills across the counter during bagging. All the same: Bernard Clayton estimates a loss of no more than 25%, and by visual estimate I can guess we haven't gone even that high.
So how did I just put seven-and-a-half-ish quarts of stock into five 1-quart bags? I confirmed this by weight; each bag contains two and a half pounds of stock. (Water weighs, conveniently, one ounce weight per ounce volume. Neat! We can assume the dissolved poultry solids contribute fairly little to the mass.)
What the hell? Why would you make a thing called a One Quart Bag with a volume of A Quart and a Half? Anybody? Anybody?
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Reader Comments (1)
Pleased to see you're still writing about your love of food. I look forward to uncovering more of your fascinating writing, which sparkles with as much intelligence and wit as your speech did when I met you, back in that cultural summer of 2001.
Cheers to you and yours. Looking forward to reading more.
The Alto Soloist -
Jaded Heart n Soul