How David Chang Gets His Broth Perfectly Seasoned Every Time

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Celebrity chef David Chang has built his Momofuku food empire around developing bold and yet approachable Korean flavors, making his name synonymous with creative noodles and paving the way for today's viral food trends. He is known for infusing classic techniques and creativity into his Asian-forward dishes and brings his decades of experience to home cooks in his book "Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes (And Love My Microwave): A Cookbook." The essence of the book (and its subtitle) refers to ditching a rigid adherence to recipes, working smarter and not harder by embracing tools like the microwave, and a focus on tasting and instincts to develop delicious flavor.

One of Chang's go-to recipes is boiled chicken. As he explained in a video for Momofuku's YouTube channel, his pro-move is to season the broth almost to the point that you'd want to eat it before you even add the chicken. "I try to take the seasoning ... to about 90[%]," he said. 

Boiled chicken is just what it sounds like: a whole chicken boiled in broth. This boiled chicken dish features in his rotation as a foundational staple that allows you to use both the broth and chicken in multiple ways, whether continuing with a fortified chicken soup, using the whole chicken for a roast meal, or even removing the meat to make a salad or a pot pie. At this point, you could even strain some off to put aside for a trendy bone-broth cocktail.

David Chang's advice is to simply start with water and season it with salt and bring to a boil. He adds a generous amount of soy sauce as well, but suggests that if you are planning on something like a pot pie, you could omit the soy sauce. His reasoning behind seasoning the broth first is that it takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation and saves time if you get the seasoning most of the way there from the start. This allows you to sort of set it and forget it, and you can easily add water later to dilute if the broth gets too salty.

All of this is done to taste, and though he starts with water, he shares you could also start with chicken or even shiitake broth. The bottom line is the old adage to taste, taste, taste, but to begin building the broth right way and then adjust during and through the cooking process (a mere 45 minutes for a stunning boiled chicken) for results that you'll keep coming back for week in and week out just like he does.