CSA week five - Roast chicken and beets

This is pretty simple, but it's one more iteration in my roast chicken series and I wanted to get it down on the record. Last time I roasted a chicken (the Hamersley's Bistro recipe before the Moroccan and boneless fried chickens), I smeared it with an herb paste that didn't do a great job in flavoring it and mostly just fell off. This time I stuffed the paste under the skin--actually I simplified it down to a parsley and thyme butter--and seasoned the outside Zuni Café style with a seasoned salt and let it sit in the refrigerator overnight.

Both the Hamersley and the Zuni recipe keep the chicken unbutchered but I decided to butterfly it. I'm also roasting the beets and, since I'm not wrapping them in foil as a lot of recipes call for (since I want the chicken drippings to add a bit of flavor to them), I wanted to spread the chicken out over top to shield them from the direct heat. I stuffed a few lemon slices in between too.

I used the America's Test Kitchen roasting method: forty minutes at 500 degrees, turning the pan halfway through. That finished the chicken just right, but the beets needed another ten minutes to get to the soft texture I was looking for.

I'm pleased with the chicken. It's a touch less succulent than the best results I've gotten before, but it is flavored nicely throughout which previously recipes that only seasoned over the skin didn't manage. The skin isn't quite as nice as the previous best either, but I think second night resting in the refrigerator before roasting would help with that. The black pepper in the outer seasoning did burn a little so I think I'll avoid that in the future and maybe use the slightly lower temperature of the Zuni method.

I still like the boneless pan frying method best, but it's good to have the oven hot on a cold night like tonight.

The beets turned out well too, but the chicken basting didn't help really. The best flavor was the pure sweet beet on the inside and the slightly crispy caramelized stumps where the tops were cut off. Maybe I should have peeled them. Are you supposed to peel beets before you roast them? I think that would let flavors penetrate better.

Hamersley's Bistro roast chicken

It's time for another roast chicken recipe. I've done several before, trying out various unusual techniques I've seen suggested for developing flavor, retaining moistness and getting even cooking. I've just created a new tag for those posts so click on "roast chicken" in the post-post tags if you're interested.

This one is a classic recipe from Hamersley's Bistro in Boston adapted by Bistro Cooking at Home by Gordon Hamersley in 2003, adapted from that by Relish Magazine in 2008 and mentioned in a pan of Minetta Tavern, the hot ticket in New York, in an Atlantic food section blog post last week.

All of that history aside, the interesting thing here is how the chicken is flavored with a wet herb paste. It's halfway between a marinade and a spice rub and, interestingly, it's got no salt in it. And you roast the chicken with a cup of glop still plastered all over it. I'm quite curious what that's going to do to the texture of the skin. I want to think it's going to bake up like a salt dome and hold in the chicken's juices, but that can't possibly work.

But before we get to that, the paste. It's made up of:
1 cup flat-leaf parsley (I included the stems as I do whenever there aren't any textural issues.)
2 cloves garlic
2 shallots
1 Tablespoon coarsely ground black pepper (Thank goodness I've finally upgraded my pepper grinder and didn't have to spend a half hour fruitlessly grinding away to accumulate a full Tablespoon.)
3 Tablespoons olive oil
1 1/2 Tablespoons Dijon mustard
1 1/2 teaspoons dried herbes de Provence
1 teaspoon fresh rosemary (replacing 1/2 teaspoon dried)

That all goes into the food processor, processed into a paste and slathered onto the chicken for a night in the refrigerator. Then it's just a light sprinkling of salt and pepper and into a 350 degree oven for an hour and a half or until a probe thermometer reads 170 degrees.

The recipe specifies putting it on a rack which I haven't got. Instead, I built an approximation out of wedges of potato and onion. I think I did a creditable job and it did keep the chicken's limbs outstretched, but the bottom ended up resting in the juices. I don't think I sacrificed a crispy chicken bottom (or top. I flipped the bird halfway through.) as even though most of the paste fell off, only small bits of skin out at the edges browned at all.


And, as you can, as soon as I started carving, the released juices (not a lot really) washed most of the rest of the paste away. Those juices I poured back into the pan and mixed with
1/2 cup chicken stock
2 Tablespoons lemon juice, and
1/2 head garlic that I had wrapped in foil and roasted alongside the chicken.

Not a half bad sauce, but the chicken is sufficiently moist and well flavored, so it isn't really necessary. It is pretty good with the potatoes, though. The infusion of flavor into the chicken is quite nice. It's just the right amount to enhance and not overwhelm the not-particularly-intense flavor of the meat. I'm particularly impressed with the juiciness of the breast meat, although that's probably because the chicken spent the second half of the cooking time with that side down soaking in the juices. I should have left it breast-side down the entire time. Then I might well have gotten crispy skin on the thigh-side. This is certainly on par with the other methods I've tried. There's no clear winner at this point, but that's only handicapping the Good Eats/ATK blend for all the butter you have to stuff under the skin.

I've got some interesting ideas about how a cobbled-together best-of method might work. Watch this space.

Another roast chicken variation

A nice thing about roasting a chicken is that, although it does heat up the kitchen, you don't actually have to be in there with it most of the time. I think I've mentioned before that my kitchen door has a rubber gasket around the edges that can seal the heat in without it contaminating my air conditioning. I get a headache if I go back and forth too often, but for roasting, that's generally not necessary.

Last roast chicken I made, I used the Zuni Café recipe. I did it by the book that time; This time I wanted to tweak the recipe in a few different ways to see how it would hold up.

My first change was to replace the basic salt and pepper dry marinade with a fancier spice mix. I used more to compensate for the low salt percentage in the hot Cajun spice mix I picked, but not enough. I had to salt the chicken again at serving. Surprisingly, that seemed to be just as good. Usually, post-cooking salting of meat doesn't work as well; Maybe this method primes the meat to take up flavorings? I have an idea of how that might work, but I don't actually know what I'm talking about so I'll spare you the details.

Post-refrigerator-rest, the original recipe calls for heating a skillet on the stovetop, dropping the chicken into it and then putting it into a preheated oven. Instead, I heated a cast iron skillet in the pre-heating oven. When the oven was up to 475 degrees, I took out the pan, added potatoes that I had cut into pieces about an inch across and a handful of garlic cloves, still in the peel, both of which I had rolled in salt, sprigs of fresh thyme and olive oil. The chicken went on top of that. The goal here was not just to roast some potatoes, but to elevate the chicken out of its juices. Last time I ended up with one side with crisp skin and one side that was tasty but soggy. Maybe this will help.

Oh, and I stuffed half a lemon and a few stems of parsley into the chicken's cavity. That's pretty standard and I was surprised the original recipe didn't do it. On the other hand, I couldn't detect either flavor in the final chicken so I dunno.

Then I roasted as per the original recipe: 30 minutes breast side up, flipped for 10-20 more and then flipped back for 5-10 for crisping. This was a 3 3/4 pound chicken so my times were on the upper end of those ranges.

Once the chicken was done, I removed it to a cutting board, pulled out the potatoes and, instead of just cooking down the drippings into a sauce the chicken didn't really need, I added a couple handfuls of spinach to the pan to wilt. It's always nice when you can get all the elements of a dinner out of one pan.




On the whole, pretty good, but no particular improvement over the Zuni original. Actually, I think the potato roasting rack idea backfired and ended up steaming the skin on the bottom of the chicken to flabbiness instead of letting it crisp. The potatoes themselves are nicely chewy on the outside, soft inside and nicely flavored by the drippings, but that flavor was taken away from the pan so the spinach didn't gain from it. Next time, I'll roast the potatoes in a separate pan alongside the chicken. Ah well, worth a try.

One more thing before I go. Since the chicken wasn't heavily spiced, but was nicely succulent, I was able to use the leftovers in a classic Chinatown chicken on rice. If you've had this dish, you know that it's a whole lot of white rice, sliced plain boiled chicken served at room temperature, maybe a little leafy green vegetable and an amazing sauce that elevates it to equal the roast pork and roast duck its served alongside. I did a bit of research and discovered that the sauce is amazingly simple, just chopped scallions, grated ginger and salt poached in a neutral oil to infuse the flavor plus a drizzle of good soy sauce and a drizzle of sesame oil. I didn't get a good picture so you'll just have to imagine it, but it was better than the original dinner and really easy if you've got the chicken and some extra spinach or somesuch about.

Zuni Cafe chicken

So, as I said in the last post, I'm finally getting with the program and trying Zuni Café's roast chicken recipe. And, as I said in the last post, the preparation is remarkably simple. Just clean and rinse the bird, pat it dry, coat with 3/4 teaspoon sea salt and pepper to taste, loosely cover and let sit in the refrigerator for two to three days.

I went for the full three days and here's the chicken at the end of that time. You can see the skin's tightened up and dried out a bit. The green bits are sprigs of rosemary stuffed under skin at each breast and thigh. I forgot to mention those.

The cooking method's just a little more complicated:
"Prepare your oven and pan: [Day of, total time is 45 minutes to 1 hour]

"Preheat the oven to 475°F. Choose a shallow flameproof roasting pan or dish barely larger than the chicken, or use a 10-inch skillet with an all-metal handle (we used a 12-inch cast iron frying pan for a 3 1/2 pound chicken). Preheat the pan over medium heat. Wipe the chicken dry and set it breast side up in the pan. It should sizzle. [I think I did this with my chicken wrong side up, actually.]

"Roast the chicken: Place the chicken in the pan in the center of the oven and listen and watch for it to start browning within 20 minutes. If it doesn’t, raise the temperature progressively until it does. The skin should blister, but if the chicken begins to char, or the fat is smoking, reduce temperature by 25 degrees. [My chicken started sizzling before ten minutes were up so I turned down the to 450 degrees even without any signs of charring.]

After about 30 minutes, turn the bird over — drying the bird and preheating the pan should keep the skin from sticking. [Using well-seasoned cast iron doesn't hurt either.] Roast for another 10 to 20 minutes, depending on size, [15 for my 3 pound bird] then flip back over to recrisp the breast skin, another 5 to 10 minutes. [Just five, but then I was recrisping the thigh skin. No mention here of using a probe thermometer to check for 175 degrees, but I did and found it creeping over 180 so a slightly shorter time or lower temperature next time.]

"Rest the chicken: Remove the chicken from the oven and turn off the heat. Lift the chicken from the roasting pan and set on a plate. Carefully pour the clear fat from the roasting pan, leaving the lean drippings behind. Add about a tablespoon of water to the hot pan and swirl it.

"Slash the stretched skin between the thighs and breasts of the chicken, [Just the skin, not the meat. I think I cut a little too deep] then tilt the bird and plate over the roasting pan to drain the juice into the drippings. You can let it rest while you finish your side dishes. The meat will become more tender and uniformly succulent as it cools."



And tender and succulent it certainly was. Just as advertised. And remarkably easy to butcher into serving pieces, too. Nicely crispy skin, at least on the top side, and even the flabby skin on the bottom had been cured into palatability during the dry brine. The meat was a little too salty, and the drippings a lot too salty, but that can be adjusted easily. And all this without all of the extra oil and butter of the America's Test Kitchen and Good Eats recipes. The one big minus I thought was that, although it was really good chicken, it was just plain chicken and there's only so much to that simple flavor. Next time, I'm adding some spices or herbs or something to punch it up a little. There wasn't a hint of rosemary so just a few sprigs isn't going to do the trick. I think the herbs were in there just to prop the skin up away from the meat to help it crisp up better. Other than that, I'm quite happy with it. Now I've got to decide what to do with all the leftovers.

Chicken in curdled milk

Curdled on purpose; you were wondering, right?

This is a Jaime Oliver recipe that got a fabulous review on the thekitchn blog. Thekitchn's kind of a mixed bag for me. I could do without (most of) the Cooking-101-level posts, the reviews of farmers markets places I'm not and the kitchen design stuff, but they also put up some interesting but simple recipes that are just the sort of thing I like for weeknight cooking. This one I've got to admit I was skeptical of, but they liked it a lot so I took a chance.

Here's the original version from Oliver's website. You'll notice he leaves the "curdled" out of the title. I'm for truth in advertising myself.

"chicken in milk
serves 4
A slightly odd, but really fantastic combination that must be tried.

ingredients
• 1 x 1.5k/ 3½lb organic chicken [Publix Greenwise will do]
• sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 115g/4oz or ½ a pack of butter
• olive oil
• 1/2 cinnamon stick
• 1 good handful of fresh sage, leaves picked
• zest of 2 lemons
• 10 cloves of garlic, skin left on
• 565ml/1 pint milk

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/gas 5, and find a snug-fitting pot for the chicken. Season it generously all over, and fry it in the butter and a little olive oil, turning the chicken to get an even colour all over, until golden. Remove from the heat, put the chicken on a plate, and throw away the oil and butter left in the pot. [Or save it for frying something later.] This will leave you with tasty sticky goodness at the bottom of the pan which will give you a lovely caramelly flavour later on.

Put your chicken back in the pot with the rest of the ingredients, and cook in the preheated oven for 1½ hours. Baste with the cooking juice when you remember. The lemon zest will sort of split the milk, making a sauce which is absolutely fantastic.

To serve, pull the meat off the bones and divide it on to your plates. Spoon over plenty of juice and the little curds. Serve with wilted spinach or greens and some mashed potato."

Mine actually looks a little better than the picture on his website. He seems to have burned his a little bit. You can't see it while it's still in the pot, but it turns out kind of weird with lovely crisp skin on top and soggy soaked skin on the bottom.


I followed his direction all the way down to the side dishes so I have some lovely smashed red potatoes and braised Swiss chard I had saved in the freezer. Be carefully defrosting chard; I ended up with a big puddle of bright red juices on the cutting board and dripping onto the floor. But, back to the main dish: the meat is falling off the bone as advertised throughout, but on the top it's the overcooked sort of falling off the bone. Not extraordinarily juicy on the bottom, either. Not compared to a brined bird, anyway. A good bit of flavor infused, more in the bottom half than the top, but the combination of garlic, sage, cinnamon and lemon isn't something I would have picked out if I wasn't following a recipe.

The sauce thinned out as the milk solids bunched up leaving the remaining liquid to just about turn into chicken stock. I would have liked it to cook down a little, but the chicken juices formed a film on top keeping evaporation low. It's definitely not an elegant presentation with the watery sauce with the curdy bits floating around. The flavors are in there, though, if somewhat diffuse. I may cook it down a bit later. I was worried about the curdling, but I'm actually finding the broken milk less off-putting than the big pieces of sage and scraps of garlic paper floating around in there. On the plus side, I fished out a couple of the garlic cloves, squeezed them out of their pods and mashed them into the potatoes. Now that's the stuff.

Overall, a decent roast chicken variation. Not the best I've made; not the worst either. Some points for the novelty factor, but I don't know where the raves TheKitchn gave it come from. I'm going to go back and take a look...Oh, I see. They accidentally put the lid on the pot so the chicken steamed. I'd miss the crisp skin I suppose, but I can see how that would infuse more flavor and keep the chicken moist as it cooked. If you're going to try it, keep the lid on for the first hour and then take it off. That might be enough time for the skin to dry out and the meat not to.

CSA week one - my Thanksgiving meal

I'm not visiting family this year so I thought I'd make a little thematically appropriate dinner for myself. Mainly, I wanted to try making a green bean casserole. As I mentioned in a previous post I've never had it before but I've known about it for decades and I've been curious what the big deal was. I used the Good Eats recipe; it says "Best Ever" right there in the name and the many reviewers agree so I was sold. Maybe I should have used canned ingredients to get the authentic experience, though.

I didn't make any major changes to the recipe beyond halving it, changing to an 8" cast iron to accommodate, and fixing the thoughtless oversight of not including any bacon.

Here's my slightly modified version:

Ingredients

For the topping:

• 1 medium onion, thinly sliced
• 1/8 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon panko bread crumbs
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• Nonstick cooking spray

For beans and sauce:

• 1 tablespoons plus 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, divided
• 1/2 pound fresh green beans, rinsed, trimmed and halved
• 1/2 tablespoon unsalted butter
• 6 ounces mushrooms, trimmed and cut into 1/2-inch pieces
• 2 thick-cut slices of smoked bacon
  
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/8 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
• 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup chicken broth
• 1/2 cup half-and-half

Directions

Preheat the oven to 475 degrees F.

Combine the onions, flour, panko and salt in a large mixing bowl and toss to combine. Coat a sheet pan with nonstick cooking spray and evenly spread the onions on the pan. Place the pan on the middle rack of the oven and bake until golden brown, approximately 30 minutes. Toss the onions 2 to 3 times during cooking. Once done, remove from the oven and set aside until ready to use. Turn the oven down to 400 degrees F.

[This is not nearly as easy as Alton Brown makes it sound (and again the reviewers agree). My onions stuck badly, despite a well oiled pan, so tossing didn't work so well and I lost maybe a third of the onions to burning and much of the rest didn't get the contact with the pan they needed to crisp up. I should have used my non-stick cookie sheet instead of a glass baking dish.]

While the onions are cooking, prepare the beans. Bring a gallon of water and 2 tablespoons of salt to a boil in an 8-quart saucepan. Add the beans and blanch for 5 minutes. Drain in a colander and immediately plunge the beans into a large bowl of ice water to stop the cooking. Drain and set aside.

Melt the butter in an 8-inch cast iron skillet set over medium-high heat. Add the mushrooms, bacon, 1 teaspoon salt and pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until the mushrooms begin to give up some of their liquid, approximately 4 to 5 minutes. Add the garlic and nutmeg and continue to cook for another 1 to 2 minutes. Sprinkle the flour over the mixture and stir to combine. Cook for 1 minute. Add the broth and simmer for 1 minute. Decrease the heat to medium-low and add the half-and-half. Cook until the mixture thickens, stirring occasionally, approximately 6 to 8 minutes.

[I should have crisped the bacon first, removed it from the pan, cooked the mushrooms and added the bacon back in with the green beans. As it was, the bacon, while adding good flavor, was kind of flabby. I forget to adjust for the thick cut of the bacon I've been buying recently.]

Remove from the heat and stir in 1/4 of the onions and all of the green beans. Top with the remaining onions. Place into the oven and bake until bubbly, approximately 15 minutes. Remove and serve immediately.

[And you'd better serve immediately because it's good for five minutes while it's bubbling hot and then it rapidly fades in quality. When it's just warm, the textures get kind of icky. Personally, I would have liked a shorter blanch on the green beans so they'd stay a little crisp, but maybe that's just because my onions weren't. I think both the flavors and textures were best out of the refrigerator the next day. Although neither were really any great shakes; it's beans, onions and mushrooms in a cream sauce. The smokiness of the bacon was a nice addition to that, I think ,but still this is probably a dish enjoyed more out of tradition than for it's own sake.]

Anyway, that's the side dish; I still need some poultry for a proper Thanksgiving. Cornish game hen is a popular choice for those dining solo on this day, but I think it looks rather sad on a little roasting dish in the toaster oven. In an aside at the end of a how-to-cook-your-Turkey TV special I saw Alton Brown cook one in a panini press (probably standing in for a George Forman Grill which is likely far more common in American homes). I haven't got one, but I thought I might be able to cook it the same way I cook grilled cheese sandwiches without one.

Step one is to spatchcock the bird. From what I read on-line that's the same as butterflying, but I suspect there's some subtle distinction in arrangement of the limbs afterwards that I'm missing. I've decided I prefer the word 'spatchcock' so that's what I'm saying from now on. That's simply cutting out the backbone, slicing the meat away from the keelbone, flipping the bird over and flattening it out. That's generally followed by seasoning and oiling both sides. In this case I used the Gullah baked chicken seasoning blend I bought when I passed through the Carolinas last year which gives a good straightforward southern cooking flavor to a bird.

Step two is to heat two cast iron pans over high heat for five minutes or so. I don't know why my camera couldn't capture the cherry red of the back burner you can see there. It would be nice to have burners that could get white hot, though.





Once the pans were piping hot I lightly oiled the large one, turned down the heat to medium high, laid out the hen skin-side up, put the small pan on top (with it's hot bottom against the hen), put my heavy cast iron pot lid on top and squished it down. It took a bit under 20 minutes to cook through and since the small pan cooled I flipped the bird a couple times.




The results are rather better than I expected from a novelty cooking method: crispy browned skin and flavorful not-too-dry (although not noticably juicy either. Maybe I should have brined it.) meat.



And that's my Thanksgiving meal. If I had thought of it, I would have gotten a can of cranberry sauce too. To be honest, I prefer the canned to the fresh. Instead I had a couple chunks of membrillo--the Spanish quince paste that's traditionally paired with manchego cheese. The combination didn't make sense to me at first but it's grown on me over time. I suppose cranberry sauce with turkey makes just as little obvious sense. Membrillo is chewier and not as tart as canned cranberry sauce, but it substituted fine. I considered roasting some turnips and then mashing them up, but I decided to save them for stock which I'll post about tomorrow.

CSA week 14 - roast butterflied chicken over root vegetables

This is essentially a cross between a Good Eats roast chicken recipe and America's Test Kitchen's version. ATK's is unusual for them in that they haven't managed to overcomplicate it until it isn't worth the trouble to make. I've cooked my version twice and was thrilled with the results the first time and somewhat less so the second. I'll note the differences as I go along, but I don't know which ones made a real difference in the end result.

Step one is to get yourself a chicken. The first time I used a slightly-under-3-lbs. Greenwise chicken from Publix. The second time a slightly-over-3-lbs. regular chicken from Fresh Market. I was rather surprised that Publix (at least that particular one) had an organic-ish free-ish range option while Fresh Market didn't. Next time I'll try a full deluxe grass-fed free-range chicken wherever I can find one. Whole Foods maybe?

Step two is brining: 2 quarts water, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 to 1 cup salt depending on how fine grained it is. I could get my first chicken fully submerged, but not the second. I can't really see a mechanism for the slight surface exposure making a big difference, but second chicken was substantially blander and dryer. Maybe I should just have let the bigger chicken soak for longer than the suggested hour. (The short soak in a very salty brine is a ATK innovation I should point out.)

Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 500 degrees F and roughly chop up the vegetables. I used potatoes, carrots and onions the first time and added some peppers the second. ATK's recipe uses just potatoes sliced and laid out. The chunky vegetables are from a similar Good Eats recipe. However Alton uses vegetables past their prime and only uses them to hold up the chicken and add flavor to the sauce that develops. I liked the results splitting the difference made. Roll the chopped vegetables in olive oil and salt and/or whatever seasoning you're using on the chicken. Take a Tablespoon of butter out to soften and mix it with your chicken seasoning.

When the chicken is done its soak bring it over to a cutting board and cut out the backbone with a pair of scissors. Cut off any extra fat too, but try not to split the skin anywhere; exposed meat dries out. I save the backbones and other various chicken bits for making stock, but this method produces far fewer scraps than cutting a chicken into serving pieces so the bits I have accumulated have been getting freezer burnt waiting for a stock-making quorum. I may have to dump the lot.

Once the backbone is out slice the meat away on both sides of the breastbone. Turn the chicken over and flatten it; the cuts you just made will make it much easier. Take a paper towel and pat the skin dry. Slip your fingers under the skin to loosen it. Once you've made some space take pieces of the seasoned butter you made earlier and rub them into the underside of the skin. You should be able to get it distributed around both the breast and thigh areas. If you want to be tidier you can spoon a bit of the butter under the skin and distribute it from above, but I don't think it's nearly as effective. Finally, massage generous amounts of olive oil into the chicken skin. If this step isn't embarrassing, you're not doing it right. I don't think I used enough of either spices or oil on my second chicken so be generous; remember that you're seasoning a whole three pounds of meat.

Splay the chicken out on top of the vegetables making sure the meat is all covered and any loose flaps of skin are laid out flat. The skin that's exposed gets golden brown, crispy and delicious while hidden skin stays flabby and unpleasant so make the effort. At this point in my second attempt I tossed the extra bits of fat I had cut off the chicken earlier into the baking dish but I think it was a mistake as my vegetables ended up nearly submerged and didn't get the caramelization that was the highlight of the dish the first time around. That's also probably a good reason to not use the pepper either. I liked how it turned out, but the moisture it lost cost flavor in the rest of the vegetables.

And that's about it. The chicken goes into the oven for 20 minutes. Turn the pan around and put it back for 20-25 more until the thickest part of the breast reaches 160 degrees F and it looks at least as good as this:

Nothing complicated really to chopping the chicken and serving it with the vegetables. You can separate the au jus from the fat and make some gravy, but if you did things right the chicken will be juicy enough to not need it. Save it for some other application. I'll probably add it to the stock I'll eventually make as a chicken flavor concentrate. Don't toss the fat either as it's very tasty and should be good for frying or salad dressing or some such.