Taking Stock

What do you do when you are given the gift of feet from fifty chickens? This sounds like the beginning of a bad joke.  Instead, it is what happens around our house from time to time.

Our farmer son comes by every once in a while, after processing a batch of chickens, with bags of chicken feet for making stock. There used to be necks, too, but after a recent trip to France where he inspected numerous butcher shops and found meat sold ‘avec la tête’ (with the head), he compromised and left the necks on the chickens he sells.

Meanwhile, what happens to the feet of the fifty chickens? They get a bit of a spa treatment: they are submerged in a sink full of lukewarm water and undergo several rinsing. Any loose pieces of skin are removed and dark spots scrubbed. After three rinses the water is clear.

The next step is dividing the feet up between two large soup pots. Into each pot go three scraped carrots, three quartered onions, plus the leaves and upper third of a head of celery, divided between the pots. If I have any fresh herbs around, such as parsley, cilantro, tarragon or dill, those might go in, too. Lifting these pots is good for building upper body strength.

I add water until the feet and their accompaniment are well covered.  Once the mix is brought to a boil, I lower the temperature and cook the stock-to-be for two to three hours.

After the mix has cooked, I get rid of the feet as soon as it is possible to handle the contents. There is no point in putting the stock out to cool so that fat can be skimmed off because pasture raised chickens have no fat. They are athletes.

Then I remove the vegetables. I puree the vegetables in a blender with stock from one pot. This gives me two different kinds of stock: one is a thicker, opaque blend, and the other is a clearer, thinner liquid. These I freeze in gallon ziplock bags, 4 cups to a bag, labeled for future soup making.

Recently, the thicker mix became part of the base for a white bean soup and a curried cream of vegetable, while a bag of the clearer stock went into a mushroom velouté.

No antibiotics, no checking labels for salt content, these bags are like money in the bank.