The Continuous Kitchen and How to Make Brown Chicken Stock

The continuous kitchen is a concept that seems lost to the sands of time.  Once upon a time, when most of the cooking was done in the home from scratch, kitchens ran with a certain amount of reliance on whatever had been prepared earlier in the day, week or month to save time and effort.  Home cooks didn't have to spend as much time in the kitchen prepping for certain meals, nor were they forced to rely on commercially prepared ingredients like canned stock.   They weren't really making things from scratch every single day, rather they were riding on a few days worth of work already done.  Often they did this prep work when it was easy to do - while they were already preparing another meal.

Modern cooks who want to replicate old recipes or old ways of cooking often need to spend a lot of time preparing elements and ingredients to cook with instead of focusing on just the meal at hand.  Old style continuous kitchens would likely plan days or weeks at a time and have the necessary ingredients already prepared, making the preparation of a wholesome meal much less time-consuming.

I try to run my kitchen in a continuous fashion, but usually I'm not that successful.  It's definitely something I'm trying to work on.  I think I need to do some more research on the subject and see what else I can learn.  I've been able to get my kitchen to run continuously for a day or two, but not much more than that.  I'll have to find more tasks that can be done over several days.  I'll describe the one attempt that has been successful so far.

The Weekend Chicken-to-Stock-to-Soup Continuity

Friday - I'll buy a whole roasted organic chicken from the market.  I love rotisserie style chicken and since I don't have a rotisserie setup at home, we buy ours.  It's great to get a break from cooking a whole meal - a treat to myself.  When we're feeling extravagant, we get a few side dishes also from the market and dinner is served.  A whole chicken is more than the two of us can eat so there are leftovers that head to the fridge.  We save the bones and extra skin from the meal and put them in the fridge for later use.  (This works just as well with a chicken you've roasted at home.)

Saturday - When I wake up, I'll put on the kettle for tea and start boiling filtered water in a stock pot.  While I wait for them to boil, I pick the remaining meat off the carcass and reserve it in a bowl.  The carcass itself goes in the pot, making sure there is enough water to cover it completely.

I peel and quarter an onion, chop about 2 or 3 stalks of celery into 2-inch chunks and toss in 2-3 carrots also cut into 2 inch chunks, along with their green leafy tops.  (Carrot tops are similar in taste to parsley and can be substituted for parsley as long as they are well-cooked.  Some people are sensitive to raw carrot tops.)  If I've been to the store, I'll add 1 pack of fresh organic poultry herbs.  If not, I head out to my modest herb garden and snip a few sprigs of thyme, some sage leaves and a few sprigs of rosemary.  All this is simmered together in the pot for at least 3 hours.  I add water periodically to keep the carcass covered.  If I have the time, I'll let the pot simmer for up to 5 hours.

Often I'll chop vegetables for soup right after I get everything going and place them in the fridge.  I do this at the same time I am preparing breakfast.  This way I can clean up everything right away and have no dirty dishes hanging about.  The only thing tied up is the stock pot and one burner, leaving everything else free for whatever else I might be doing like cooking breakfast or lunch.

Usually I am at home doing chores on Saturday so it isn't hard to keep an eye on the pot.  I stir it once in a while and make sure everything is going well.  If I need to run to the store or go on a short errand, I make sure the heat is turned down, but I can leave the pot cooking on the stove for a bit without supervision without trouble.

At the end of 3-5 hours, I have a nice stock ready for whatever purpose I have in mind, usually soup.  A stock of this kind made from a roasted chicken carcass is often referred to as a brown stock.  When I'm ready to make the soup I saute the veggies I chopped earlier and then add them to the stock.  I can also drop in the chicken meat I removed earlier.  I let the soup cook about 40 minutes more.  The result is a rustic style chicken soup with homemade stock that doesn't really take a lot of time or effort.

Sunday - The soup is eaten again, either as lunch or dinner.  Sometimes the soup will last til Monday, but that doesn't happen often.  :)

Variations
Sometimes I'll use half the leftover meat for another dish (like chicken lettuce wraps or chicken sandwiches) on Saturday and save the soup for Sunday night.

The types of continuous kitchen tasks you can implement are varied.  Since we are not used to one kitchen task leading into another, it can be hard to figure out what to do.  Try to think of what kinds of meals can lead to other meals.  Once you get good at doing certain tasks in sequence, you'll know what ingredients you need to have on hand to complete the steps.  Master it and you can have a series of delicious home-cooked meals for significantly less time and effort.

And now... a recipe:

Brown Chicken Stock
1 roast chicken carcass, meat picked off and reserved
enough filtered or purified water to cover the carcass
1 pack fresh organic poultry herbs
1 yellow onion, peeled and quartered
2-3 stalks celery, cut into 2 inch chunks
2-3 whole organic carrots, cut into 2 inch chunks (stems and all)

Combine all ingredients in a stock pot and simmer uncovered for at least 3 hours and up to 5 hours.  Strain with a metal colander.  If making soup, saute veggies first then add to the pot along with the reserved chicken meat and cook for another 40 minutes.  If simply making stock, remove from heat and let cool.  Freeze or refrigerate stock for future use.

Basic Kitchen Equipment

What I have found in my own kitchen is that if you have the proper selection of quality equipment, you can tackle just about any recipe.

If you are new to cooking, you may not have the things you need. If you already cook frequently, you could have too much - it might be the time to weed out what you've got. Since quality seems to make more of a difference than quantity, it's worth spending your money on a few good items and dontaing the items that aren't going to work as well to the thrift store.

There are millions of kitchen gadgets out there designed to help the cook do less work, but what I've found is that whatever you save in work time you make up for in cleaning time. There are a few gadgets worth having around, but those are few and far between. In reality the basic equipment we already know and love is all you really need to be a fantastic cook. Getting back to basics may well be the best way to master kitchen skills.

A basic kitchen includes the following:

• quality, non-aluminum pots and pans without a non-stick coating
• wood, rubber, bamboo, silicon or metal utensils compatible with your pots and pans
• metal or glass mixing bowlsin 3 sizes
• a set of 2 or 3 quality chef knives
• a large non-plastic cutting board (I recommend bamboo)
• Glass Measuring Cupfor liquid measurements
• Stainless Steel Measuring Cupsfor dry measurements
• Metal Measuring Spoon Set
• Metal Perforated Colander
• glass storage bowls with tight-fitting lids
• an uncoated roasting pan or pizza pan
• a metal grater (any kind will do)
• 2-Quart Glass Baking Dish
• Glass Citrus Juicer
• Fruit and Vegetable Peeler
  

You'll notice I don't include any plastic in the list above. Why? Plastic was not meant to be a part of the human diet. No matter the quality, plastic utensils leave trace amounts of plastic in our food. Additionally some common kitchen plastics are porous - they can stain easily, absorb food particles or even leech chemicals into food. (Plastic lids that don't come in contact with food are OK.)

Sure, we're told plastics are safe and for many people they are. For others thousands of nameless toxins collect in the body from exposure to plastics and other chemicals that over time wreak havoc on the delicate human system. However we live in a time that provides us with so many better choices there is no need to take a chance. Personally I prefer the feel of wood/bamboo for most of my utensils anyway. Utensils made of natural materials are readily available in almost every kitchen shop and supermarket these days. There isn't really a good reason to use plastic.

Additionally all utensils wear out over time. Throwing out useless plastic items contributes to a greater problem modern societies are facing - storage space for trash that doesn't biodegrade. If you use wood, you can toss your worn out utensils in with your yard waste.

The other thing you probably noticed is that I prefer to use pans without a non-stick coating. Again, Teflon (the major component of non-stick coatings) and its ilk are not meant for human consumption. Yet non-stick coatings wind up in food all the time. This means it also winds up in our bodies. A 2008 study of 45 nursing mothers in Amherst, Massachusetts revealed perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA, a type of PFC) as the second most frequent contaminant in breast milk, present in every single one of the study's participants. While the amount of this chemical ingested by babies from breastfeeding is considered 'safe', what does that say about what is inside the mother's body?

Incidentally if you own parrots, burning up a non-stick pan could be fatal to your birds. You've heard of a canary in a coal mine, right? Well animals as sensitive as birds can die from exposure to those chemicals found in your cookware. If it can kill birds, why take chances with your own health?

Most people opposed to non-coated cookware are concerned that cleanup can be a pain. Honestly, I am terribly lazy and I haven't really had much trouble cleaning up mine. The other argument is that non-stick pans allow you to use less fat when cooking and people don't want to add more fat. It's true that more fat is used in traditional cookware, but I'm not really positive that using less fat to cook is as beneficial as many people claim. I'll write more about that later.

Lastly all aluminum cookware should be avoided as long term exposure to aluminum has been linked to Alzheimer's disease. Additionally aluminum and copper cookware are considered to be 'reactive' cookware, meaning that in some circumstances the cookware could discolor soups or sauces and impart a metallic taste.

Ultimately the choice of what to use in your own kitchen is yours alone. However if you are making a big effort to work on your health, starting with cookware seems like a logical choice.