SFist in the Kitchen: Stock
Though this column usually focuses on farmer's market finds, we want to occasionally offer some advice on common kitchen techniques. Great ingredients make great food, but so do great skills. Have something you'd like us to discuss? Send us an email or leave a comment.
A freezerful of stock is a cook's secret weapon. Create buttery, flavorful boiled rice by using stock in place of water. Make extraordinary soups with homemade stock. Finish a dish with a rich, stock-based pan sauce. Braise food in stock to add extra dimensions of flavor. Impress your friends with tales of stockmaking (though this doesn't work for us nearly as often as you'd think). You can buy good stock (hint: not with a Swanson's logo), but if you know how to make your own, you can control the flavors and stretch ingredients a little further. Save the bones from your roast chickens, and convert them to a golden elixir every few months. It's like getting a bonus meal out of the chicken.
It's an easy skill. You can find complex instructions, but we prefer the simpler forms. Yes, it takes time, but you don't have to do much work, so set it up before you hunker down for a night of TV, and by the time the news comes on you'll have a richly colored, aromatic addition to your pantry.
Photos by Melissa Schneider
- Prepare and chop ingredients.
Some home cooks view the stockpot as a vessel for anything and everything in the crisper drawer. Resist this urge. You want fresh ingredients for the best flavor, and a neutral set of ingredients will give you a more versatile stock. Fennel fronds may seem like a good idea now, but you might not like the anise-flavored minestrone you'll make over the winter. Virtually all our stocks—meat and vegetable—start with a mirepoix, a classic combination of one part peeled carrot, one part celery, and one part onion. We also add parsley and bay leaves. We don't add salt, because if we want to reduce our stock after it's finished, we don't want something too salty. Bottom line: If you want to add unusual flavoring or seasoning, do it to a small portion of finished stock, not to the big pot.
For meat stock, save bones and scraps of uncooked meat in the freezer and combine them with mirepoix. We use about one part mirepoix to about one chicken's worth of bones. The bones release gelatin into the water, which gives the liquid a thicker body that adds a luxurious quality to sauces and soups. You can roast the bones in a hot oven for thirty minutes or so to produce a stock with a deeper color and flavor.
We chop our ingredients coarsely. The longer your stock is going to cook, the bigger the pieces can be. The smaller they are, the faster your stock will finish.
- Cook the stock.
Place your ingredients into a pot, and cover with cold water (1-2 quarts per 2 pounds of ingredients). Bring to a hot temperature with the cover off, but don't let the water boil. Or even simmer. "One bubble should break the surface every few seconds" say the chefs at the Culinary Institute of America. If the water boils too much, the proteins in the ingredients break up and emulsify into the stock, creating a murky liquid. This isn't a big deal when you're making risotto, but think of how beautiful your chicken soup will be with a crystal clear liquid. For the same reason, we don't stir our stock.We check our pot every fifteen to thirty minutes to skim the frothy scum that collects on the surface. Do you want to eat it? No. Get rid of it.
Depending on the stock, it could take an hour or it could take ten (vegetable stock usually takes us 1, chicken stock 4-5, and beef stock 10). Taste the liquid as you go, and stop when it seems flavorful (remember that there's no salt, so it will seem bland).
- Strain and store the stock.
We like to use cheesecloth to strain out the little bits of food, but a good sieve will suffice. If it's a meat stock, we strain it into a large container and place the stock in the refrigerator overnight. The next morning, we scrape off the fat that's collected in a solid layer at the top of the cold liquid. Then we distribute the stock among small containers (2 cups or so) and freeze them (labelling the containers with the contents and the date). You can keep the stock in the refrigerator as long as you boil it for a few minutes every three days.
- For advanced users.
Friend of SFist Tom Dowdy provided a great tutorial on reducing meat stocks (especially beef stock) to make glace de viande, a potent ingredient for sauce makers.
If you want to make a fish stock, use leeks in place of onions. Fish stock takes about an hour.
- Using stock
In general, we use stocks that match the ingredients. We use beef stock to braise short ribs, vegetable stock for vegetarian soups, and so forth. We use chicken stock more than any other. We usually pull out a small container, heat it until warm, and taste it. Sometimes we like it as is, sometimes we simmer it for a while and let it reduce. Find a flavor that works well for your dish: a more watery stock provides a subtlety that will let other ingredients come forth.
When we cooked crayfish for a fruits de mer platter, we poached them in a court bouillon, vegetable stock with wine added for acidity.