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On Consommé
Classic consommés

By Jack Lang (Jackal10)

This course will explore one of the many ways to use the stock you have on hand from Stock Making or from any excellent home-made stock.

Hot or cold, a consommé is a light and perfect start to a meal. A properly made consommé is one of the triumphs of classical cuisine and a good test of the skill level of a professional or amateur kitchen. It shows off your wonderful home-made stock to its best advantage.

For every 1 quart (1500 ml) of stock (chicken or brown (beef) stock), you will need 6 oz (200 gm) of boneless and skinless chicken breast and one or two egg whites. (Fat is the enemy of clear consommé, so ensure the stock is well skimmed.)


Ingredients for consommé

Some people add vegetables and herbs to the clarification. However Escoffier thunders:“It will be seen that I do not refer to any vegetable for the clarification. If the [stock] is well carried out, it should be possible to dispense with all supplementary flavouring, and, the customary error of cooks being rather to overdo the quantity of vegetables – even to the extent of disguising the natural aroma of the consommé- I prefer to entirely abandon the idea of vegetable garnishes in clarifications, and thus avoid a common stumbling block”.

Trim the chicken breast of any fat or sinew and place it, along with one egg white in a blender. Blend until smooth. A stick blender will also work well, especially when making a large quantity.


Chicken and egg white ready to be pureed

Add the stock and blend again.
Put into a saucepan on low heat and simmer gently.


Stock added and blended


Consommé simmering and proteins beginning to coagulate

After a while the proteins in the chicken and the egg white will start to coagulate, forming a raft, and trapping the remaining fat and the impurities.


Raft has formed

Leave it to simmer slowly for an hour.


Dipping under raft to spoon up liquid and moisten raft (after about an hour).

If it looks like it is drying out on top, carefully reach under the raft with a spoon and splash a bit of the liquid up and over it. Do not be tempted to stir – you don’t want to break up the raft.

The slow bubbling will cycle the fluid though the raft, which will act as a natural filter.

After an hour, carefully decant the liquid. Filter it through a sieve lined with a coffee filter or with a double layer of kitchen (paper) towel. Try not to break up the raft too much. However the raft is like a big sponge, so it may need to drain a bit.

Check the seasoning. It will need salt, and maybe a splash of Madeira or sherry. It may also need diluting. Don’t make it too strong, - it’s a soup not a sauce. Escoffier again: “ …if too gelatinous it is positively disagreeable…”


This stuff is clear!

This consommé, hot, or cold and jellied, is ideal served as an amuse, without garnishes, in demitasses or shot glasses.

The old tradition was that such a consommé (perhaps laced with a sweet wine like Madeira) was served for a late night supper, after the ball, for its easily digestible and restorative nature, hence its reputation as aphrodisiac.

A spectacular party trick is to add spangles of pure gold leaf to the nearly jellied cold consommé. Gold is edible and a small amount of gold leaf is not that expensive. (Make sure you purchase edible gold leaf.) You need a single sheet, cut into small pieces, for each quart of light chicken consommé. Serve with a glass of good brandy or Madeira and you have "Consommé aux paillettes d'or".

There are hundreds, if not thousands of named garnishes for consommés. Le Répertoire has over 10 pages of them. I will discuss just two - royales and quenelles. Other garnishing components are vegetables or meat cut into matchstick julienne,or small cubes (brunoise), or balls or other shapes cut with special cutters. Whatever they are, you want them to be small enough to fit into the spoon you will be offering with the consomme. Alternately, if you choose a garnish like quenelles, then they must be of a soft enough consistency to be cut with a spoon.

Note: Le Répertoire is "Le Repertoire de La Cuisine" by Louis Saulnier, first published in 1914 and still in print today (ISBN 0812051084). It is a concise listing of every dish known to the classical cuisine—7000 recipes in 240 pages, and still a standard reference work. The list of consommé variations given here and at the end of this lesson, is partially adapted from this book.

Royales

Royales are fancy shapes cut from a solid, savoury custard. You can make the custard in many flavours and colours: tomato (red), carrot (orange), spinach or peas (green), or truffle (black). Chefs, when entertaining an ambassador or head-of-state, will often choose colours to match their national flags.

Here we make chicken royales, but you can substitute 6-7oz (200 gm) of one of the pureed vegetables mentioned above.

For a chicken royale (white) whiz 3 ozs (100 gm) cooked chicken breast with 1 1/2 tablespoons of a thick béchamel in a food processor or blender. (Béchamel is just a fancy name for white sauce.) We will cover béchamel in a later course so for now you can use your favourite recipe for a basic white sauce or, alternately, just increase the amount of cream (see below). You can also just add a teaspoon of cornflour (cornstarch).


Cooked chicken ready to be pureed

Whisk together ¼ cup (75 ml) of cream, one whole egg and the yolk of another egg (you can use the white in the clarification of the consommé). and strain through a sieve into a buttered ramekin. Stand the ramekin in a baking tin or roasting pan, and add boiling water to come half way up the sides of the ramekin (This is a bain-marie.)


Custard in bain-marie

Poach in the bain-marie in a low oven (225F/120C) for 45 mins. Allow to cool.


The cooked custard

Turn out carefully on to a cutting board. Cut off and discard the top skin and trim the custard to an even thickness. Using tiny pastry cutters or a sharp knife, cut into fancy shapes.


Royales cut from cooked, cooled and trimmed custard

Put the royales in the soup bowl and pour the hot consommé over. A nice presentation (and an old restaurant trick to make presentation and setup easier) is to put the garnishes into the bowls at each table setting and ladle the hot consommé over them at serving time.


Consommé Royale

Quenelles

Another popular consommé garnish is quenelles: feather-light spoon-shaped dumplings. Here we will make chicken quenelle mousseline (that is with cream, rather than from a béchamel base). The same recipe can be used with any fish, meat or vegetable puree. A traditional version is made from pike, and may have been the origin of gefilte fish.

Quenelles are really light, despite the cream, and great for people on carbohydrate-reduced diets. They make a classic restaurant or dinner- party dish, as all the preparation can be done in advance. The quenelles will keep for a day or two, covered and refrigerated. You can reheat them in the hot soup, or in hot salted water, or even (hush) in the microwave.


Larger quenelles in sauce for a light lunch or unusual starter

To make the quenelles, you will need 8 oz (250 gm) of raw, skinless, boneless chicken, the whites of two eggs (save the yolks), and 8 fl oz ( 250 ml) of heavy cream.


Ingredients for quenelles

Whiz the chicken and the egg white together in a food processor. Add quite a lot of salt (2 tsp).


Pureed chicken and egg whites

Fill a large bowl with crushed ice and set a smaller bowl on the ice. Strain the pureed mixture into the smaller bowl. Add the cream and beat together until you get a smooth paste.


Cream added to puree. Note the outer bowl of ice.


Seasoning the puree

Check the seasonings: I’ve added a little white pepper, and a suspicion of nutmeg.

Mould with two spoons into a non-stick (or well buttered) baking tray or shallow roasting pan. It is much easier if you keep the spoons warm and wet in a jug of hot water. Small quenelles (teaspoon size) are ideal for a consommé garnish, larger ones can be eaten as part of a light lunch or as an elegant starter.


Placing shaped quenelles in pan

You can also pipe this mixture, or form it using wet fingers.

Fill the pans with nearly boiling water, covering the quenelle. Simmer gently on the side of the stove. They will only take a few minutes. When they float (maybe with some encouragement) they are done. Turn them over to ensure the top is poached as well, then lift our with a slotted spoon and drain.


Poaching quenelles

These can all be prepared well in advance.


The finished dish: Consommé garnished with quenelles

Now that you have the basics of consommé-making, I encourage you to experiment further. There are a host of consommé variations - here is a list of some of them.


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