- Mike Sula
- Five-headed chicken soup
The grippe recently swept through my household, leaving me without strength, courage, or voice. Friend of the Food Chain Kristina Meyer must have tired of my wheezy, desperate whispers between bouts of bronchial death rattle, so she set about the heroic task of making me a very special soup. “This isn’t food,” she told me. “It’s medicine. It won’t necessarily taste great.” Incorporating five heads of garlic (hence the name), a whole hand of ginger, and more than 15 fingers of fresh turmeric, plus chicken, beef bone marrow, a half-dozen different varieties of chile, a eucalyptus teabag, frozen tofu, skin-on limes, and much more, it was medicine I feared might make my hair fall out.
Kristina Meyer’s Five-Headed Chicken Soup
While chicken is coming to a boil, juice the following in a heavy-duty juicer (if you don’t have a juicer, use a food processor or blender to pulverize ingredients into a paste, and if you don’t have any equipment, dig in with a good sharp knife and chop each ingredient into fine dice):
After three hours, remove pot from heat, remove all solids and strain liquid through a sieve to remove any particulate. Make sure to scoop out any marrow clinging to the insides of the bones and put back into the broth. Ideally, this broth should then be stored overnight in a refrigerator so the fat rises and hardens for easy removal (but not disposal!)
** Use the rendered fat to fry eggs in, or even better, make one of the many rice dishes from around the world that start with frying raw rice in a spiced fat (like biryani, pulao, paella).
