Mock, Paper, Scissors

It seems we are at the start of the holiday cooking season, and so once again, it is time to open up Tengrain’s Little Cooking School, which is a sort of on-again, off-again recurring feature. It all started when a Scissorhead had to take care of his ill wife and three kids, and did not know anything about how to cook, and was panicked.

The School is not about recipes – you can find recipes just about anywhere on the web, and many of them are good. No, these posts are about technique, my theory being that if you know how to do something, then you can be creative on your own.. When you master a technique, no recipe will ever cause panic.

Today, we focus on stock. “Tengrain,” you say — yes, I can hear you, didn’t you know? — “I can buy perfectly good stock at the market. Why do I need to know anything about that?” To which I respond, the stuff at the market (while sometimes good) is expensive, and you don’t really know what went into it. A well made stock is practically free, much more delicious, and is not work intensive.

Meat stocks are basically bones and water. Add an onion, a carrot, some celery and you are pretty much done. If you can boil water, you can make stock, so why pay $6 for a quart of the store-bought stuff when you can make as much as you want for the price of an onion?

“But Tengrain,” you say, “I don’t want to be stuck stirring and skimming a vat of soup all day…” Then don’t — I never do. While I usually do this on a day (or evening) that I am planning on being home, I do not hover over the pot, I don’t believe in skimming foam off the top (more on that later), and if the stock ends up cloudy, well who cares? You are going for flavor here.

If you are a thrifty Scissorhead, you will save the carcass from your roasted chickens, and when you feel you have enough, make stock. You can even save the gnawed bones for this; I generally make stock with 6 carcasses or the equivalent divided up parts. Some butchers that cut up the birds in store have carcasses and bones that they will be glad to give you for free. Ask – it never hurts to ask.

Ingredients:

• Chicken bones or carcasses — including some fat – it is where the flavor lives.
• a whole onion — unpeeled; the skin adds color
• a few ribs of celery — rinsed but whole
• some carrots – I peel these, but well-rinsed works
• some herbs and spices, like bay leaf, sprig of thyme, peppercorns – whatever you have that you like — I always use cloves too, but that’s a French thing
• salt
• water

Make it:

1. I put the herbs and spices in a tea ball to make it easier to keep track of.
2. Toss everything in a big pot – big enough to be able to cover the bones with a few inches of water. Give it the water.
3. Bring it to a boil, then reduce the heat and let it simmer. Go watch a football game. (Or, go watch the Cleveland Browns.)
4. At the football game’s halftime, taste the stock and add salt.; unless you are on a salt restricted diet, that is. (But even then, consider it. You are making a large quantity of liquid that will be used for months (from the freezer), so it is not as if you are eating salt all at once. That said, I am not a doctor, so don’t let me overrule something your Doc told you.)
5. After the football game is over (I’m guessing this is about three hours on average), turn off the heat. Let it cool.
6. When it cools enough to touch the pot with your bare hands, remove the bones, the vegetables, and the tea ball, and pour the stock through a strainer. Put it in the ‘fridge overnight so that the fat floats up to the top, and you can easily lift it off in the morning.
7. Pour it again through a strainer into containers to freeze. I figure I use about 2 cups at a time, so that is the size of my containers.

Ok, pretty easy technique, right? You can do this same stock with any meat bones — lamb, beef, and yes, pork.

Getting Fancy

You guys know me well enough to know that there had to be more…

For a richer stock, before you begin, you can brown the bones. Put them in a roasting pan in a hot oven and roast the bones until they are brown; try to keep them in a single layer so that they brown evenly. Throw them in the pot. Deglaze the roasting pan, and add those juices to the stock pot. There’s a lot of discussion amongst chefs about the merits of brown stock vs. white stock. For me, yes, brown stock tastes better, but I’m not always willing to take this extra step.

Clarify the stock
You can clarify the stock — and this I do because, well, I’m French. This technique does two things: the stock becomes absolutely crystal clear — shiny, in fact — and the flavor increases. You will build a raft and the raft will effectively filter all the cloudiness out of the stock.

After you have defatted the stock, return it to the now-clean stock pot. In a large mixing bowl, you want to make an emulsion of flavorful vegetables and egg whites (I use celery leaves, chopped carrots, the green parts of leeks that I am not going to use for anything else, parsley stems – pretty much whatever you have — and about 6 egg whites.) You chop the veggies up, stir and mash it up with the egg whites to make a congealed-looking mess (this is the raft), and add it to the stock pot.

Return the pot to the stove, and stir the cold stock and the raft really well to mix it all together — it will look like hell and you will curse my name — and slowly bring the pot so a simmer and low boil. DO NOT BRING TO A ROLLING BOIL.

The raft eventually will congeal and rise to the surface as a solid mass, and soon a few holes will appear in the top. The stock will bubble up through these holes. Let it do this for about an hour. As the stock bubbles up, the raft picks up the impurities and filters them out of the liquid below.

Let the stock cool, gently lift out the raft (I throw it away, but I know others who add it to a meatloaf mix), and now strain it into your containers.

Congratulations, you are now a master stock maker, and probably able to speak French now!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 12:11 pm by Tengrain and is filed under Tengrain's Little Cooking School, food. 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.