Chinese soup stock
(a 2002 essay of mine, slightly revised)
For years, I’ve been making what I thought of as Chinese stock, as suggested by many of my cookbooks. Chicken, meat and bones, a scallion or two, a couple of slices of ginger, water to cover, simmer with lazy, slow bubbles for 4-6 hours, presto! Nice, clean, clear, essence-of-chicken stock, perfect for using instead of water in some recipes, or making terrific clear soups, rich and delicate at the same time.
But there’s another kind of Chinese stock out there. I am not sure exactly how it fits in, but I knew my Chinese cooking knowledge was missing some things the first time I tasted soup noodles, at Hon’s Wun Tun House in Vancouver, maybe 14 years ago (it was before they moved to the larger location). The broth was not particularly concentrated, but was still like nothing I’d ever experienced, savory and balanced and tasty. I knew chicken alone could not account for this.
It turns out that this alternate stock has many uses, and is probably superior to chicken stock for many of the things I was using chicken stock for. If you’ve been to Hong Kong, you'’ve probably seen, on the menus, extremely expensive dishes of “Shark’s Fin in Superior Soup.” Superior soup is a top-quality version of this sort of stock. Shark’s fin is flavorless, it’’s all about texture, and all of its flavor must some from the soup. That’s a lot to expect from a soup, to make a $100-$200 dish, but it just goes to show you how good a stock like this can be.
My ignorance about the contents of this magic stock persisted until a couple of years ago. I was in Hong Kong, having dinner with a group, and it turned out that one of my fellow diners was a former Chinese Chef! He’d grown up in a Hong Kong restaurant family, and had experience with every role in the operation you could name.
Here was my chance to ask the questions that had been burning at me for a decade, questions that should have been trivial, but which I knew, from the inadequate results of many experiments, that they were not.
My first question was, how do you make Congee?
My second was, how do you make the broth for soup noodles?
I got my answer: it’s a chicken, pork, and ham stock. That’s all. [since I wrote this, I’ve been told that restaurants often add their own touches, dried seafood for example] There are some important details:
Ham
By “ham,” of course, he meant Chinese ham, like Yunnan ham. This is a dry-cured ham, quite similar in spirit to our authentic Smithfield and Kentucky country hams. I'’ve heard that China-bound planes out of Dulles often have an inordinate number of these hams in the cargo hold; presumably they’re cheaper than the Chinese article. Some of you may have seen an Iron Chef in which one of the ingredients was a very special Chinese ham, and noted that they said what it was prized for: making the best possible soup stock.
Yunnan ham, is, as far as I know, unobtainable in this country, and customs regulations prohibit bringing your own back. However, a good country ham is a reasonable substitute. The one I use is from Gatton Farms; it won a taste test that Cook’s magazine did a few years back, and, if you want, they’ll send it in roughly quarter-inch slices, bone and all, vacuum packed with two slices to a pack. Country ham is a real challenge to slice, so this is extremely handy both for stock-making and for my favorite method of preparation for pure country ham, pan frying (340 degree surface, flip every 1 minute to avoid overcooking the outside, about 4-5 minutes total).
Yunnan ham is a little milder and a little sweeter than American country hams, with less of that harsh tobacco overtone. For stock-making, I have found it beneficial to soak the ham slices in cold water for a few hours before adding them to the stock pot.
Pork
Naturally enough, you don’t want to dump a pork tenderloin in there. You want a stewing cut, with lots of flavor and some gelatin to add to the stock. I have settled on pork hocks (unsmoked, of course) as a perfect choice. I tried adding a pig’s foot, but that was too much gelatin.
Bamboo Mat
It is absolutely essential to avoid the overcooked-fibrous-meat flavor that arises from the stuck-on meat at the bottom of the pot. Therefore, you put a bamboo bat covering the bottom of the inside of your stockpot. I was able to jury rig something by taking a saw to one of my bamboo steamers, using the bottom to make the mat. It wasn'’t structurally pretty, but it worked. Later, I found more manageable mats that I could trim easily with scissors, at a Vietnamese restaurant supply store in Seattle.
Chicken
You want savory chicken flavors, and you want to avoid those overcooked flavors, so the delicate, easily-overcooked breast is not what you want. Wings, thighs, legs, necks.
I made a stock along these lines, using the same techniques I had used for chicken stock. It was very good, much closer than I’d come before, but it needed refinement.
Enter a new, and excellent, cookbook: Yan-Kit’s Classic Chinese Cookbook. Here at last was a recipe for this stock. I used it, and my previous experience, to construct what I thought of as The Great Chinese Stock Experiment, and made some batches of stock. Here’’s what I found.
Proportions: Yan Kit’s recipe called for equal weights of chicken, pork, and ham. American Country Ham is stronger than Yunnan ham, though, and I had many stocks with too much ham flavor to prove it. The proportions I settled on, finally, were (by weight) 3 parts chicken, 3 parts pork hock; 1 part country ham.
Preparation issues: It’’s better to trim all of the fat from the outside of the country ham slice, to minimize the tobacco flavors that distinguish country ham from Chinese ham.
Ingredient issues: I experimented with using a small amount of lightly cured, lightly smoked ham from Vermont in conjunction with the country ham, in the hopes of coming closer to the touch-of-sweetness of Yunnan ham. This was a failure. The smoky overtone of the final stock was inappropriate, and, fundamentally, the balance of the stock was wrong. When it’’s right, the ham ties the pork and chicken together into a seamless whole. This stock was disjoint. Lesson: stick with 100% country ham.
Cooking issues: Now this was interesting. I'’m used to making stocks at a very slow burble, to keep them clear, and cooking for 6 hours, which seems about right for getting the flavors out. But the Yan-Kit recipe called for a faster simmer, for only three hours. I could only settle this difference by experiment.
The 3-hour-simmer stock was cloudy; the 6 hour one clear. But the 3 hour stock was clearly superior in flavor, with a rich, savory body. Plus, even with the very slow simmer, there was a slight touch of overcooked-meat-flavor in the 6 hour stock; for such a perfectly balanced stock style, this is an unacceptable defect. I don’t know what the soup noodle and shark’s fin restaurants do; their stock is pretty clear. Maybe they clarify it afterwards. Maybe they have a bamboo platform rather than a bamboo mat, to avoid those overcooked-meat flavors.
The Yan-Kit recipe introduced me to another concept: prime stock vs. clear stock. Prime stock is my 3 hour stock. Clear stock is what happens when you simmer the meat used to make prime stock for another three hours in fresh water. Prime stock is for soups and other applications where the flavors are essential. Clear stock is surprisingly reminiscent of veal stock; it’s more about body and umami than it is about flavor. It’s handy for substituting for water in recipes where you want richness.
So, after all that, I’m prepared to give my preferred recipe for Chinese Soup Stock:
By weight, before trimming:
3 parts chicken thighs, legs, wings, and/or necks (but not more than half necks and wingtips)
3 parts pork hocks, unsmoked
1 part Gatton Farms Kentucky ham
Slice ham into quarter-inch slices; soak the slices in ample cold water to at least cover for 2-4 hours. Trim all fat, but don'’t worry about fat that was not at the outside of the ham.
Remove skin from pork hocks, but leave the connective tissue clinging to the bone
Line a stockpot with a bamboo mat and add the meat. Add water to cover, plus an inch. Bring to a moderately lively simmer over medium heat (don’t let it boil or overheat). Partially cover, leaving about ½” of space open, turn down the heat to maintain the simmer. Simmer three hours, checking periodically on the simmer. Strain.
The remaining meat should still have some nice flavor. It’s surprisingly tasty dipped in soy sauce (well, don’t use soy sauce on the ham). Or, clean out the pot and mat, and add more water, and simmer another three hours to make clear stock.
I’ve finally reached my stock milestone. This stuff is delicious. It was hard not to just keep wolfing it down, straight. Dump in some sliced Chinese BBQ pork and some scallions and some undercooked noodles, and you'’ve got real soup noodles. And now I’m finally ready to make some proper soups. Yan-Kit has a hot and sour soup recipe using this stock that I’ve got my eye on.