Stock sweet stock, liquid gold, a good stock is something you can drink “as is”. Forget about adding it to a soup or sauce. It’s good on its own with the slight addition of a touch of salt and pepper.
While I can cook pretty much any cuisine under the sun and have mentored under French, Austrian, Italian, and I’ll call them “Modern American cuisine” chefs for lack of a better term; Plus I’ve had several Asian friends who taught me a considerable amount about Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Indian and Moroccan cooking; among others, my strengths and love is as a saucier. I love to make soups, stews, sauces, and…..you guessed it, stocks.
My pinnacle of perfection in a sauce (just like a lovely stock) is taking a spoonful of it to taste for any adjustments, and just wanting to drink the sauce down by itself.
Forget the seared tuna, the pork medallions, the chicken scallopini; just give me the sauce. Yummers!
The key to most good sauces, specifically for meat and poultry, is a damn good meat stock. Brown sauce (made with a meat stock) is one of the traditional Mother sauces; I’m not going to quibble about is there 4, 5, 6 or even I recently saw a classification for 7 Mother Sauces (also called Grand Sauces) because that’s not the topic at hand here, stock is.
A traditional brown sauce (or Espagnole sauce) is a rich, dark colored sauce made from stock thickened with roux (generally fat and flour and cooked a bit), pureed tomatoes, and mirepoix (usually carrots, onions and celery), and then strained with various additions to it to make various sub sauces or daughter sauces.
There are a million and one recipes on the internet and in cookbooks for how to make brown sauce, and all pretty much the same, so am not going to waste your time with a recipe, when your buddy Google is easily at hand.
What I do want to talk about, is the base for a damn good brown sauce is an excellent stock. And I’ll preface this by saying I am NOT trying to pick on my Alumni school here because it is the premier Culinary school in the world (call me bias), but I do have to add that I learned more about traditional French cooking working for Chef Yves Labbe at Le Cheval D’or in Jeffersonville, VT then I learned at the Culinary Institute of America.
Yves took pretty much everything I was taught at school and chucked it out the window. His cooking was traditional country French culinary, meaning cream, butter, and salt in large amounts in pretty much everything.
Yes, we used all of those ingredients in the E Room, also known as the Escoffier restaurant, now renamed the Bocuse Restaurant, at CIA, but there were many differences.
The #1 difference and not just in the French restaurant in school but also taught in the basic skills classes you have when you first start the culinary program where they teach you basic stock making and mother sauce making. The difference is in the stock.
When I was first hired as Yves’ Chef de cuisine, he ran me through some of the basics of what he had on hand all the time. On my prep list, the first day was to make a large pot of stock for use in many of the sauces on the menus.
I browned the bones, prepped my vegetables, all was going well until…………………..I started skimming the stock.
Imagine in your head, if you will, a short red-faced Chef with a very heavy French accent yell quite loudly “What are you doing???????”. Me: “Well, Chef, I’m skimming the stock.” Queue the heavy French accent again. Chef: “NO, NO, NO! Do NOT skim! Fat is FLAVOR!” A phrase to be repeated numerous times in the course of working there but usually used in a loving way about things like butter, cream, and anything bad for you in general.
It was, I think, the only time he ever raised his voice to me, but he did adore yelling at my Sous Chef on a daily basis, “Jayyyysoooonn (Jason) what the ell (Hell) do you think you are doing??“.
A brief discussion ensued where I stated I was doing it the way the CIA had taught me, skim the impurities off, including the fat, etc.
To make this brief, Yves wanted to prove a point and had me make the stock the way school taught me, using lean ingredients, etc.. He made a batch the way he traditionally made it, lots of fatty meat, table scraps, pan drippings, and pretty much any vegetable lying around that would add flavor including peelings. He did take the fat off the stock but AFTER it was chilled off and solidified on top.
I do have to say, my first taste of his stock vs. the “traditional” way taught me was “Hot damn, that’s incredibly good!” Yes, his stock was muddy looking and not clear vs. how CIA wanted a clear and beautifully clarified one. His take on it was this was how it was done in France and when you added additional elements to a brown sauce, roux, herbs, cream, butter, liquor, or wine, the finished product was enhanced more by the flavor, and the clarity itself was kind of moot at that point anyway.
We did make consommé at the restaurant, and his was crystal clear. But Fat IS Flavor.
I also worked for an Austrian chef, his nickname behind his back was not a very nice term honestly, people might remember the Soup “fiend” from Seinfeld; this was the Food “fiend” The character reminded me of a conglomeration of several chefs I worked for over the years. His “No soup for you” reminded me of a Thanksgiving Day at Trapp Family Lodge (where I did my externship from CIA) and Chef Michel Martinet’s “Nobody faint in my kitchen” rant, also a topic for a future blog post.
In this kitchen (the kitchen of the Food “fiend”), the first few months, every new cook had a bucket next to their work station. At the end of every service period, the chef would spread a tarp out on the floor and everything that could have been utilized in some way, in a stock for example, ends of bell pepper that could have been used for garnish, etc. if it was found in the bucket, he docked your pay. Don’t worry he didn’t use the scraps after the fact 🙂
I learned more about food scrap utilization from him, and as a result, had a very low food cost in the restaurants where I was in charge of the kitchen. He was so anal retentive that when we chopped parsley for garnish (this was the early 90’s and parsley plate garnish was still a “thing”), he made us use a pastry brush and get every little speck of chopped parsley off the cutting board to use.
You might say whether you are a home cook or a professional chef, parsley is cheap, but in a restaurant that would go through 8-10 bunches of chopped parsley a night, a couple of cents adds up every day. I don’t remember the exact amount that I costed out years ago, but I estimated that if he had not made us do this, he would have by the end of the year thrown out about 400 dollars of product just from that little bit left on every cutting board.
He put pretty much anything in stock, and his favorite stock was called the “everything” stock, and it was on low every day and every night. Things got added to it continuously, meat and vegetable scraps, and it got strained down when the big pot was too full and started anew.
You might think there was no consistent flavor because there was such a mélange of beef, pork, chicken, duck, and other meat and vegetables, but it always consistently tasted wonderful. When I helped open Harvest Market in Stowe, VT. this was always a hot seller, I’d make big batches of vegetable and “everything” meat stock and we would sell it by the quart out of the freezer section at $7.00 a quart, not too shabby for scrap utilization, but it tasted wonderful!
This chef was a close friend of both Yves and Chef Michel Martinet. I just found out Michel passed last year and was very saddened to find that out. He was a mentor of mine, and I had gone back to work at Trapp Lodge after I graduated from the culinary before being lured away to another job.
I still have the recommendation letter he wrote for me in 1991 when I went back to school to finish and graduate.
In Vermont’s Green Mountain area, specifically the Stowe and surrounding towns, there was a network of chefs from the old country, and their word (and knowledge) was worth their weight in gold.
In years going forward, when I ran my kitchens, I saved every scrap that was usable for stock and, when I had room froze it if needed until I had enough for a big batch of stock. Homemade stock beats commercial stock base every single time, plus it’s cheaper.
How does this apply to a home cook? If you have a little spare freezer space, start saving those carrot ends, garlic peelings, celery tips, herb stems (after the leaves are removed for use), chicken bits, sparerib bones, roasted chicken carcasses, etc.
If you are a big fish lover, same thing, shrimp shells, crab shells, fish bones, and lobster shells for fish stock. No, I don’t mix them with a meat stock, but you can mix fish stock with chicken bones for an enhanced flavor.
When you have enough product for a gallon or so, add it all to a big pot, cover with water and simmer for a few hours, and strain.
Chill down responsibly, ie, please don’t just stick several quarts of hot stock in your refrigerator as you don’t want to poison your whole family.
Putting a pan in a water bath with ice cubes or chilling it down with a chill stick is so much safer from a food safety perspective. Retail refrigeration is just not made to keep up with a lot of hot steam added to the mix. It’s never anything I would recommend in a professional kitchen either but it’s a thousand times worse in a home kitchen.
When your stock is chilled overnight, the fat will rise to the surface and form a solid layer, and it makes it that much easier to remove it at that point rather than trying to skim off any fat prior.
Stock freezes very well, or you can reduce even further to make demi-glace, which is a much-reduced stock.
What NOT to put in “everything” stock
- Too much onion or garlic peelings (unless you like a heavily garlic or oniony flavored stock How much is too much? The peels from a dozen onions is too much per gallon of stock, peels from 10 cloves of garlic the same.
- Anything in the brassica family; cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, bok choy, rutabaga, kohlrabi, rutabaga, collards, turnip, brussels sprouts etc.
- No potato peelings of any kind, this includes white potatoes (all varieties), sweet potatoes/yams
- I would also stay away from adding things like taro root and cassava as well, while they won’t make your stock sour, similar to squash and squash peelings they can give a starchy mouthfeel to a stock.
Both members of the brassica family and potatoes will make your stock sour, but pretty much any other kind of vegetable is fair game. Any leafy greens can also be added but use sparingly and add towards the end of the cooking time.
Just making vegetable stock is also fantastic, just exclude any meat products. For only vegetable stock there are some additional notes you may want to consider as vegetables if used in larger amounts can overwhelm the delicate flavor of a vegetable stock. If the vegetable base calls for something predominately, like making a vegetable Jambalaya, Okra is fine, but it will also impart a strong background flavor.
Use sparingly:
- Okra
- Asparagus
- Beets are ok, but no beet skins, greens can also be used but added later in the stock cooking stage.
- Chards
- Cilantro and larger amounts of any strong herb, rosemary, and marjoram fall into that category.
- Hot peppers
- Lettuces (remember no cabbages)
- Spinach
Demi or Demi-Glace (photo at top) is made by reducing a stock down significantly, while traditional recipes say that demi is reduced stock plus brown sauce (or Espagnole sauce), all of the commercial kitchens I’ve ever worked in, it is only very reduced stock. Traditionally reduced by half, I reduce it to about 1/4 of the original liquid. You will not get the gelatinization that you will with a vegetable stock or fish like you will with a meat stock when it’s as greatly reduced.
I typically will take a batch of demi (like the one above), cube it up into 2 inch pieces (after it’s been chilled and solidifies) and freeze the cubes slightly separated on a well wrapped sheet pan to keep out freezer odors. When frozen, I’ll put into a ziplock bag and can take cubes out as needed for sauces or soups/stews. Go forth and happy stocking!