Chicken broth, soba

The roasted chicken from the previous post was broken down into two piles.

*useable meat to be frozen
*bones and everything else


The roasted skin, tendons, and general debris is included with the bones.

The bones are broken apart with pliers to expose the marrow.

The broth will be frozen and used as needed wherever commercial broth would be used. No herbs or aromatic root vegetables are to be included in this stock. The broth remains a sort of a blank slate upon which near infinite flavor combinations are written.

The mass of bones and debris was boiled in six quarts of water. A foam forms that is skimmed off. The photos below show the pot within the first few minutes of boiling with the foam on the surface.  It's not all that clear because of boiling action looks much like protein foam.

I want the pressure cooker to brutally shove the marrow out of the bones. 

The chicken was run through a colander into another pot then run through a sieve back into the original pot.

Chilling will allow the oil to separate from the broth and become firm on the top. The fat forms a hardened disc that differentiates from the gelled broth beneath it. The fat-disc can be lifted off easily and discarded.

So that's the chicken broth. Now the soba noodles.

Soba originally referred to thin buckwheat noodles but recently it has come to mean any thin noodle opposite of udon thick noodles.

The  soba noodles that I made are egg noodles from 100% semolina, a hard duram wheat.

In addition to noodles the soup also included,

* collard, cut into small squares

* mushrooms sliced

* sweet peas sliced through

* chicken bits from the roasted cicken

Then three herbs and one aromatic were added.

* rosemary

* cilantro

* parsley

* green onion

I could have called this chicken noodle soup and been done with it but I added soy sauce and that changed things.