Clarified Soup Stock

For Christmas Eve, we traditionally have fish and seafood, and, hilariously, my grandparents have yet to figure out that 2kg of shrimp is too much for 14 people. I helped them clean the fish and took all the entrails to make fish stock. The entrails included skins, shells, heads, bones, beaks, pens, and eyes from shrimp, whiting, cuttlefish, and squid, irrespectively. (As a side note, always by cleaned squid. It's worth the cost versus doing it yourself. The fish monger said that only Italian people by uncleaned squid.)

I threw all this into a pressure cooker and made stock. The smell was very, very strong. If my parents were going to throw me out in the street, the smell of this stock was going to do it. It took a few days to dissipate. When preparing it, I threw in some agar (0.5% w/v). After cooking it, I poured it out into a pan, let the agar solidify, then froze it. I placed my fish-sicles on a coffee filter in a strainer over a bowl. As the ice melted, the agar acted as a filter and removed all the solids. The results were amazingly clear since the original soup had a lot of the ink from the squid and cuttlefish making it an opaque purple-black colour. After clarification, it was perfectly clear and a reddish amber colour, about the same colour as fish sauce.

Although I expected this agar filtration method to work at clarifying the stock, I was thoroughly impressed at how well it worked. I expected some cloudiness or sediment, but it really was perfectly clear. That being said, I have learned a few lessons.

The stock had frozen as one solid mass. I used a hammer to break it into manageable pieces, but they weren't really that manageable. In future, I would freeze them in small chunks, which also freeze and thaw faster. That being said, small chunks are hard to heap in the sieve. I think making the ice in a muffin tin would be best as the chunks would be very regular and I could stack them. Volume is also an issue. In the pressure cooker, I made 4L of soup. My largest catch bowl is only 2L and my strainer couldn't hold 2L of ice. That was inconvenient. One thing I did to right is make sure that everything was glass or metal. The few plastic things that came in contact with the sauce have a fishy smell.

I will definitely use this method in the future and add it to the Family Cookbook.

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