The Ask of Averting Fowl Play

Dear Tamar:

Thank you so much for all the thoughtful and helpful answers you share. I am wondering about chicken. I typically buy two whole chickens and boil/simmer them in a large pot to get the most out of the bird—basically all the meat and tons of stock. However, I’d like to roast a chicken, which in and of itself is not a problem, but then I don’t get as much meat and no stock … Can I roast a whole chicken, enjoy it as such, pick off as much meat as possible, and then boil/simmer after that to collect the extra meat and get some stock? I’m hoping you say yes :) Thank you again!

-Averting Fowl Play

Dear Averting Fowl Play,

Among the things that I love about Madrid, one rises to the top in a symbolic foam or an insulating layer of delicious fat. It is cocido Madrileño. There are many versions—it’s a Spanish preparation/meal I’ll describe in more detail below—including cocido montañes from mountainous Cantabria and cocido Lebaniego from Potes. Any cocico gives me the same solid happiness as the one from Madrid—with the qualification that it, rather than any of them, is my adopted city’s version.

Describing cocido is a bit more complicated. First, the word itself, which means “cooked.” It also means “boiled,” but it’s worth putting the simplest definition first because it makes a point. This, the use of the term tacitly declares, is cooking.

Second is naming its category. I’ve read cocido described as “a stew,” but “a stew” is a single dish composed of discreet ingredients cooked together—or stewed, to further complicate the complex—in liquid. A cocido may be stewed but the result doesn’t look like what we imagine when we hear the word. Cocidos are meant to be served as three courses: 1) a broth with fideos (fine noodles), 2) a dish of beans and vegetables, recognizable as stew, and 3) a plate of mixed meats accompanied by a sauce. “Then call it a ‘three course meal!’” you shout. I would! But some people prefer to eat it as one course, and some people as two, and some as three. It ends up being entirely tautological: the result of making a cocido is a cocido, nothing more and nothing less.

Unsatisfied with this tautology, I press on: a cocido is a way of cooking a number of ingredients at once that minimizes the number of dishes and pots that need washing, and maximizes the utility of each ingredient. It is a perfect illustration of the quiet compassion of the cooking vessel, which permits so much to enter and prohibits loss or waste.

I thought of cocido when I read about your weekly practice of boiling two chickens. It’s a close reflection of what you do every week, creating broth, cooked meat, and maybe some vegetables, all at once. It is a steadying way of approaching cooking—using the same amount of time, the same amount of heat, and the same number of pots to produce several courses—or meals—as you would to produce one. You asked whether you can roast a chicken, slice and pick off its meat, and use its carcass to make broth. The answer is “yes,” but I find myself more interested in the question of whether there is a way, once your chicken is roasted rather than boiled, of finding the steadying efficiency, logic, and practicality of the cocido or boiling pot.

I’ve come up with several answers. The first answer is that it makes the most sense, in terms of efficiency, logic, practicality, and taste, to freeze the carcass from your roast chicken, and freeze next week’s, too, and then put both in a stock pot of vegetable scraps when you have a third carcass, as well. You’ll end up with fuller flavored stock and more of it than if you just boiled away a single piddling carcass. This means that for two weeks you are poor in stock, and for a third you’re rich as a Rockefeller, as least in chicken broth.

The second is to simmer a pot of chickpeas on your stove while the chicken is roasting. I admit that this idea is cribbed from cocido Madrileño, distinguished by its inclusion of chickpeas. Chickpea broth—the wonderful, seasoned, herbaceous broth resulting from the cooking of chickpeas—can certainly be used as chicken broth would, to moisten reheating dishes over the course of a week, or to start a soup. It also gives you a safe and liquidy landing place for small bits of roast chicken you tear from the carcass, which you can deposit in a container of chickpea broth and then eventually add to leftover rice or freshly cooked noodles and some water for a lunchtime soup or stew.

A third idea, similar to the second, is to cook a big pot of rice at the same time as you roast your chicken. You will not end up with a liquidy landing place for salvaged scraps, but rice is nonetheless a landing place par excellence, its lack of fluidity aside. If you have cooked rice, you have a whole series of rice meals, from fried rice to congee to chicken soup with rice, at arm’s reach.

Both chickpeas and rice carry the additional benefit of offering you a destination for the drippings and beautiful browned bits left in the roast chicken pan. Once the chicken is out of it, return the pan to the heat briefly, add a pour of water or wine, scrape up the drippings, and add them to the chickpea or rice pot and rest assured that none of the chicken has gone to waste.

My final idea—a paltry one—is to use all the space the oven avails while it is turned on. Take the opportunity of a roast-chicken-calibrated oven to toast croutons or nuts. This hardly provides the time-tested resilience of either cocido or a boiling pot, but it’s more than nothing. And sometimes, that’s as good as it gets.

Dear cook, you have already solved the age-old problem of making the absolute most of what you have. This leaves you in a strange position, faced with another problem, dating to perhaps the same age: how to deal with those occasions on which you make somewhat less than the most of what you/re given—those days when you make something of something—and not much more. I don’t know that I would refer to those circumstances as foul (fowl) as much as inevitable—not as in need of averting as of accepting.