Introducing: Chicken Drink
Jocks mock the stock cocktail, but flocks squawk: "it rocks!"
In the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley reveals that the novel’s central conceit came to her in a dream:
I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.
She was writing about Victor Frankenstein and his monster. I am writing about Chicken Drink.
Chicken Drink came to me not in a dream, but in a waking nightmare in the soda aisle of the Sunfresh. I was scanning the shelves for ginger beer, minding my own terrible business, when a $4.49 can of “Raspberry Hibiscus sparkling collagen water” caught my eye.
“Collagen water,” I scoffed. “Why not just carbonate some chicken stock?”
Followed by:
“…and why not add some whiskey and make a chicken highball, while you’re at it?”
Followed by:
“…and why not fat-wash that whiskey with schmaltz, as long as you’re going to the trouble?”
You can see where the intrusive thoughts began.
It didn’t help that right around this time, Food People On The Internet were going apeshit about a collection of novelty “brothtail” recipes released by the Canadian arm of Campbell’s Soup.
Many talented writers have dunked on Campbell’s drinks, but most of them seemed more hung up on the idea than the execution. My beef with the recipes? They’re just ordinary cocktails that someone has ruined with soup.
No one wants to drink a regular-ass negroni to which someone has added a thimble of packaged “Thai chicken broth.” A booze-y tom kha, on the other hand? Sign me up.
The problem, as I have written about on this newsletter before, is that companies lack the courage to go Full Savory. We deserve fewer half-measures and more half-chickens. We deserve uncompromising flavor. We deserve a soused soup with pertinacious poultry—a literal cock-tail.
Almost as soon as I had the idea, I texted Ryan Miller, who owns Fancies Sodas & Cocktails, to ask his advice. Instead of blocking my number like a reasonable person would, he whipped up three experimental batches of chicken soda and sent me home with the prototypes.
Those first tests were promising. Ryan’s carbonated broths had an even stronger chicken flavor than their source liquids—a function, I suspect, of the fizz kicking those meaty aromas straight into my nasal passages.
Still, I knew I needed to make my own soda. I want the techniques in this newsletter to be accessible to home cooks like me, and I don’t have a pro-grade carbonation rig—I have a SodaStream my parents got me for Christmas.
Plus, Ryan’s soda had a delicate, elegant chicken flavor, and the goblin that has colonized my brain wanted something more indecorous, more intense. The goblin was filling my head with a profane chant in an infernal tongue. It sounded suspiciously like “thicc drincc.”
So I set about making my usual stock, with chicken wings as the base (wings have an ideal ratio of meat to bone, balancing flavor with maximum collagen extraction). I skipped some of the usual aromatics to keep the focus on the chicken—celery and carrot got axed, onion and garlic stayed—and threw in some bones from a previously roasted chicken to deepen the flavor.
I cooked the whole mess in my InstantPot for 90 minutes under high pressure. That’s enough time to make a killer stock, and I’d advise against going much longer if #thiccdrincc is your goal. Once the gelatin molecules have dissolved, continuing to cook them just breaks them down further and make them less effective at thickening.
I made this NSFW GIF so you can see the texture I was working with.1 Here’s my stock after an overnight in the fridge:
Satisfied, I turned my attention to the next component: chicken-fat-washed rye whiskey.
Whenever I trim fat or skin from a piece of raw chicken, I save it in a little baggie in my freezer to make schmaltz—rendered chicken fat, usually with a little onion cooked in and strained out.
Schmaltz is a staple in Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine, and I had a nagging fear that using it in a chicken highball was somehow anti-Semitic. It didn’t help that none of the liquor stores I visited stocked (certified) kosher rye.2
In the end, I settled for bonded Old Overholt and the hope that none of my readers who keep kosher would feel excluded from an obviously cursed project. But one could use bourbon here, too; the ratio’s the most important thing. I added about an ounce of schmaltz to 250 ml whiskey. Here’s the jar pre-infusion:
I let the rye infuse for a couple of hours, shaking the jar a few times during the first hour. Then I popped it in the freezer overnight and skimmed off the fat in the morning, straining the remaining whiskey through a coffee filter for good measure.
It worked. The schmaltz-washed rye was silky and rich and perceptibly chicken-y. I preferred it to the virgin rye in a side-by-side test.
At this point, I was feeling pretty cocky: I was ready to ruin my SodaStream. Part of me wondered if I could even approach Ryan’s level of carbonation at home with a much more gelatinous stock (and without blowing up my kitchen). There are ways to objectively measure this, but I’m not about to buy a Zahm CO2 tester for home use.
So in the pursuit of unscientific science, I did the next best thing: I borrowed a pH meter from my neighbor, who owns a small-batch condiment business.
Wait a minute…why pH?
When water is carbonated—literally, when carbon dioxide gas dissolves into water—it produces a weak acid called carbonic acid. That carbonic acid does exactly what you’d expect it to do—it makes the water slightly more acidic. Which means: when you carbonate water (or anything else), you lower its pH.3
When it comes to measuring fizz, pH is a proxy measure in the most generous sense, but it does seem to track carbonation levels relatively well. Because Ryan gave me containers of his pre-carbonated broths in addition to the sodas, I was able to get a decent baseline of how I should expect my home versions to change.
I moved my SodaStream to the sink as a precaution, and then filled a soda bottle only about half-full with stock to try to minimize blowouts.
The good news: the process was less messy than I expected. The stock appeared to carbonate relatively well; there were visible bubbles!
The bad news: the fizz quickly fizzled. Ryan’s broths had dropped a whole point on the pH scale after carbonation. Mine only dropped by about a half-point, and that was with me pushing the SodaStream to its legal limits.
Still, you can’t argue with the results:
If I were putting this on a cocktail menu, I’d give it an undeservedly cute name, like “The Schmaltzing Matilda.”
I will not be putting this on a cocktail menu, because no one will let me near them anymore.
On my second attempt, I gussied up the proceedings by freezing some cooked vermicelli with stock in an ice cube tray. I would call this one Soup Drink. Or maybe Melt-O-Meal.
If I cared more about presentation, I would have clarified the stock with egg whites; in the photo, you can barely see the soupberg lurking ominously below the surface. And the soda stock needs some work—a bolder color, a more bombastic fizz.
Still, it’s a start. The booze, at least, was a success. I’ve had three good ideas in my life, and schmaltz-washed whiskey is two of them.
Plus, my goal with this experiment wasn’t to design the platonic ideal of a brothtail, just to advance the burgeoning field of unabashedly savory soup booze. I have achieved my Minimum Viable Product and am already contemplating future enhancements—a rosemary garnish, a bouillon rim.
My interest is earnest. I’m always hunting for savory drinks. I would start every morning with a Bloody Caesar if I didn’t know that it would shred my esophagus like barbacoa.
In fact, I was so convinced in the merits of Chicken Drink, I cold-pitched the idea to an editor. I got an almost immediate rejection, with a tongue-in-cheek note that what I was attempting was “sicko shit.”
When I told Tom about this, he was unsympathetic:
Me: “I fear I am destined to be one of those writers who toils in obscurity, whose genius is only truly appreciated after her death.”
Tom: “…from chicken-poisoning.”
The ancient Twitter wisdom holds: women literally only want one thing and it’s fucking disgusting.
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I also reserved a quart of the stock and tried reducing it down by about half. I had thought that I could make a sort of chicken concentrate that I could add to seltzer like soda syrup. After chilling the reduction in the fridge, I realized I had produced something even more sinister: a roast chicken Jell-O shot. I could hold the container upside down, like a Dairy Queen blizzard, and the stock was unmoved.
If you’re curious about why rye whiskey isn’t necessarily kosher, this article has some helpful background.
This is yet another reason why human-caused climate change is a problem. Excess CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels is dissolving into seawater and gradually acidifying the ocean. Seems bad! Surprised Exxon hasn’t rolled out a “Make La Mer LaCroix” campaign yet.
I'm glad someone is doing this terrible work and I only have to read about it
Dreaming of a celery straw with which to slurp this masterpiece