Stock & Fond Atlas · Soup

Chicken Consommé, Raft Method

Advanced
45 min
roughly 2 of 4 for cost

gently hot · herb-fresh Leads with a warm current of chile, fresh herbs arguing happily on top.

Ingredients

2.5 litres cold chicken stock, fully degreased and set to a jelly
400 g lean chicken leg meat, minced
170 g egg white, about 5 whites
120 g onion, finely chopped
100 g carrot, finely chopped
80 g leek, finely chopped
80 g celery, finely chopped
100 g ripe tomato, chopped
4 parsley stalks
1 bay leaf
6 white peppercorns, cracked
6 g salt

The skills inside

The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil Straining & passing through a sieve Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth

The words inside

Consommé & Clarification

Allergen screen

Found: egg · celery

Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.

Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.

Method

Mix the minced chicken, egg whites, chopped vegetables, tomato and aromatics into a loose slurry and chill it hard for 30 minutes. Everything that goes into the pot must be cold. 30 min
Whisk the slurry into the cold jellied stock in a tall heavy pot, then stir constantly over medium heat until it reaches 55-60C and turns thick and cloudy. Stop stirring at that moment and do not touch it again.
Let the raft rise and knit for 10 minutes, cut a 5 cm chimney in it with the back of a ladle, and drop the heat until a single bubble breaks through the chimney every second or two, around 82C (180F). 10 min
Hold 55 minutes untouched, until the liquid seen down the chimney runs transparent amber and the raft above has gone grey and firm. 55 min
Ladle out through the chimney into a double layer of muslin, never pouring, then blot the surface with paper to take the last beads of fat. Season at the end.

How to tell it is going right

This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.

Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth 73 recipes

It is held below a rolling boil for the whole time. Agitation drives fat and fine protein into the liquid as an emulsion, and nothing skimmed afterwards will take them back out.
The grey foam that rises in the first minutes is lifted off and discarded rather than stirred back in.
Fat is taken from the surface where it gathers, the pot moved off the centre of the heat if that is what it takes to collect it in one place.
The liquid is visibly clearer at the end than it was at the start: it is possible to see down into it.
Nothing lifted off goes back in. What was skimmed is discarded, not tipped back once the ladle is full.

Where it goes wrong The pot was allowed to boil, usually while something else was being attended to. Fat and protein emulsify into the liquid under agitation and cannot be lifted off afterwards, so the finished broth stays cloudy and greasy however patiently it is skimmed from then on.

Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes

Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.

Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.

At the Table

The Pour: Pinot Noir or Gamay
Also Right: Chianti or Barbera
From the Taps: Bière de garde
Zero-Proof: Verbena iced tea

Chicken is wine’s most agreeable partner. Match the SAUCE, not the bird: cream to oak, tomato to Sangiovese’s acid, herbs to Loire whites.

Family notes

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Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Chicken Consommé, Raft Method The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Stock & Fond Atlas kitchen