Corduroy Orange

Buy low, sell high.

No, not that kind of stock—the culinary kind, created by simmering bones and vegetables in water to create a flavorful liquid that can serve as the basis for your soups and sauces.  Homemade stock correctly made is almost guaranteed to be a higher quality than the canned/boxed alternative you can buy at the store.  Though it takes a bit of effort to start/ finish the process, the middle is effortless.  The act of making stock is its own bit of pre-planning that makes your future culinary endeavors (soups, sauces, braised meats, pilafs, couscous, etc.) easier to execute and higher quality in their results.

These tips can help you to make a better stock more easily:

• Pre-boil to remove impurities. Cover your bones with cold water, bring them to a boil.  Drain them, wash the pan, cover the bones with cold water to rinse off any impurities stuck to them.  Drain them.  Cover the bones with cold water, and then start the stock from there.  I know, it sounds kind of labor-intensive—but as with many aspects of life, a little extra effort at the front end makes the back end that much easier to deal with.  Many of the impurities that you want to keep out of your stock (think the bubbly scum that forms on top of the pot) can be extracted at the beginning by following this process, and you won’t have to worry about skimming them off later.
• Create your own ice wands. Speaking of a little planning at the front end….  Save a few plastic bottles (water or soda), remove the labels, wash them well, fill them a little more than 3/4 full with water, and freeze them.  Then, when you have drained and strained your stock, immerse the frozen bottles in your bowl of stock to plunge its temperature quickly without watering it down or taxing your refrigerator unnecessarily.  This strategy is used (on a larger scale, with plastic tubes that look like soda bottles on steroids) by restaurants to get the temperature of the stock down to “chilled” status within regulatory time limits.
• Simmer, don’t boil. A gentle simmer will produce a better result than a rolling boil.  If you have violent bubbles bursting through the surface, turn the heat down!  (As I previously wrote in relation to braising—let the Beastie Boys be your guides: “Low and slow, that is the tempo”).
• Don’t add the vegetables at the beginning. Whereas chicken bones need to be simmered 4-8 hours and beef bones need to be simmered 8-12 hours to extract their flavor; vegetables require a much shorter time span.  Whole veggies could probably use a couple or three hours, but if you’re cutting them into smaller chunks, you can reduce the time required drastically: veggies cut small can be fully extracted in as little as 45 minutes.
• Be creative with your mirepoix. Mirepoix, as defined by classical texts, consists of 50% onions, 25% carrots, and 25% celery.  But you don’t need to be constrained by this box.  What sorts of flavors do you think would complement your stock?  For instance, I always enjoy throwing cranberries and apples into my poultry stock; and if I’m lucky enough to have venison bones to simmer, cherries are a very nice touch.  Mushrooms are a fantastic addition to any stock.  Some ingredients to be careful with, though: peppers, broccoli, and asparagus.  They can take over a stock quite easily and get to be very bitter if cooked too long—so if you are contemplating any of these, use sparingly and add only to the final 30 minutes of your stock’s simmer.
• Remove the bones before draining. It’s always tough to strain stock without having it splash EVERYWHERE.  But, if you fish through the stock pot with a pair of tongs and remove the larger pieces (bones, etc.) to a separate container, the straining process becomes much easier because you’re only pouring liquid through the strainer—the solid chunks aren’t making a splashdown and getting in the way.
• A nice idea for straining that I can’t get to work. Alternately, Alton Brown recommends attaching a piece of cheesecloth over one end of a plastic tube, lowering that end of the tube into the stock pot, and using your thumb over the open end of the tube (much as you would pick up liquid in a straw), draw enough stock out to start the liquid siphoning into a pan at a lower level.  It makes total sense on paper, but logistically, I have not been able to get the tube to coil down into my stock pot correctly: the covered end keeps popping out of the stock, and therefore I can’t get enough stock into the tube to start a siphon; and in the end, i wind up making a bigger mess than if I had just gone ahead and poured it through the strainer.
• Portion and freeze. I divide my stock into pints and quarts before I freeze.  Then, depending on how much I need for what I make later, I can pull out an appropriately-sized container.  If your needs find you using different quantities, freeze in different quantities (for instance, I have heard of people using ice cube trays, then storing their ’stock cubes’ in a plastic bag).

Happy cooking!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 25th, 2010 at 11:55 am and is filed under Cooking Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.