Chicken Consommé

The experience of making my first consommé was such a thrill, I even remember who I was standing with, also making his first consommé: David Scott, in my first skills class at the Culinary Institute of America. We had started with standard, opaque gelatinous chicken stock, then simmered it with ground meat and vegetables and egg whites, and what we ladled out of the pot was an elixir that was clear as crystal—in fact, it was the clearest colored liquid I’d ever seen. It seemed to magnify an