Home › July › To Clear Soup Stock
To Clear Soup Stock
After straining the stock through double cheese cloth, remove all fat and put the stock into a four-quart stew-pan. Place on range and allow the white and shell of one egg for each quart of stock. Beat the eggs slightly and crush shells in small bits, add slowly to stock, stirring constantly but slowly until the boiling point is reached; let boil two minutes. Reduce the heat so that stock barely simmers twenty minutes, skim and strain through double cheese cloth placed over fine soup strainer. If stock to be cleared is not sufficiently seasoned, add more seasoning before clearing.
This is a technique rather than a dish: the egg-raft clarification that turns cloudy stock into consommé. The instructions are sound, and only a few details need translating.
- The hinge: stop stirringThe recipe has you stir until the boiling point is reached; after that, leave the pot alone. Once the coagulated egg begins to gather at the surface, stirring breaks the raft apart and drives fine particles back into the liquid, which is exactly what you are trying to remove.
- Barely simmering means barelyAfter the initial two-minute boil, the surface should show only occasional lazy bubbles, somewhere below a true boil (roughly 180-195F). A rolling boil shreds the raft and re-clouds the stock.
- Remove the fat cold"Remove all fat" is far easier if the strained stock is refrigerated overnight; the fat sets into a cap you can lift off in one piece. Any fat left behind will not be caught by the egg and will leave the finished consommé greasy on the lip.
- The eggshellsCrushed shells add surface area for particles to cling to and do no harm, but they are optional; the whites do the real work. If you use them, rinse the shells first, since they carry whatever was on the outside of the egg.
- Season first, as instructedThe recipe is explicit that seasoning goes in before clearing. Aromatics added afterwards reintroduce particles and cloud the pot, and the clarified stock can taste flatter than expected because the egg carries off some flavor with the sediment.
- StrainingDouble cheesecloth over a fine strainer works; wet the cloth first so it does not absorb stock. Ladle rather than pour, and do not press the raft — squeezing it forces the trapped sediment through.
- YieldExpect to lose some liquid to the raft and to evaporation over the twenty minutes. Start with more stock than you need for the finished soup.
- A four-quart pan for lessA four-quart pan -- Whatever the reason for the size given, clarification benefits from depth and headroom, so a taller pot is preferable even for two quarts.
Clarifying with egg white is old kitchen chemistry put to decorative use: the albumen coagulates as it heats, trapping the suspended proteins and particles that make stock cloudy, then floats them to the top as a raft. A clear soup mattered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a transparent amber consomme was taken as the mark of a competent kitchen and a conventional opening to a formal dinner. The technique is generally traced to French professional practice, where the same raft method, often reinforced with lean ground meat and mirepoix, still produces consomme today.