Q&A for Stocks and Sauces Class - Unit 1 Day1

[Fat Guy]

I find canned broth sometimes acceptable, or at least better than dried cubes, but agree that there's no substitue for a good homemade stock.

Though you can use canned in some applications, such as braising, and get pretty good results, I've never found a commercially prepared brown meat stock that I considered remotely satisfactory for use as a saucemaking base. So, for example, if you braise some short ribs in canned beef broth they might come out tasting pretty much like you braised them in real stock, especially if you add mirepoix and wine and the like, but when it comes time to reduce the braising liquid into a sauce your sauce will be totally inferior not to mention too salty (which is the biggest problem with most prepared stock products). There are a few ultra-premium demi-glace and glace products out there but I don't even like those -- not even the one James Peterson has endorsed. Some butchers make their own stock and sell it, but I have yet to find a butcher who is really good at making stock and who takes the kind of care that a home cook would. And of course the expense of purchasing a lot of it tends to be too great. So unless you have a friend in a culinary school or a restaurant kitchen who's willing to supply you with stock, there's ultimately no way around the brown beef/veal stock issue if you want the best.

When it comes to white poultry stock, I am not religiously opposed to substitutes. In real-world tasting, you won't notice such a huge difference in many applications. I still think real stock gives you an edge when it comes to saucemaking and dishes where the stock is front and center (like a chicken soup), but a high-quality commercial product is useful if you don't have stock on hand. I particularly recommend, if you must go in this direction, the stock-in-a-box products that come in packaging like that Parmalat UHT longlife milk. These tend to have less salt and fewer strange flavors than the canned products. Also, if you're just making soups and you like Asian flavors, you can usually get good chicken stock from a Chinese restaurant -- they'll sell it to you for about a buck a quart if you negotiate. I used to do this in a pinch at a restaurant near my house (the one that seemed to use the least salt in its stock) but now it's closed. I made matzoh ball soup one time with this Chinese chicken stock and it was surprisingly good.

But in the end, even if a totally convincing substitute existed, I'd still make my own stock. I like the precise control it gives me over every aspect of flavor, and I find it therapeutic -- much as some people find breadbaking therapeutic even if they live near a bakery that makes better bread.

[Carolyn Tillie]

You haven't discussed basic aromatics. I like adding a few peppercorns. Heston Blumenthal advises adding a small amount of star anise - he claims it is a (Umani) meat flavour enhancer.

I offered to do a cream soups, potages etc unit. I'd be happy to add clarification,  consomme and soup garnishes  to that.

Here again is where FG and I somewhat disagree. While I do not tend to add aromatics to my chicken broths (leaving them a black slate), I do add aromatics to my brown stock.

I find the blank chicken stock more versatile towards adapting to adapting to other tastes but since I most often utilize my brown stock into French-style sauce, the use of basic aromatics is one that seems second-nature to me. In my brown stock, I utilize peppercorns, bay leaf, thyme, and parsley.

Regarding consomme, one of my greatest joys was collecting the bones from ducks and rabbits in the freezer for quite some time. Those added to veal bones (all roasted) made a lovely 'game' stock. Later, I made it into a consomme with ground venison. Stunning - absolutely stunning.

[balex]

I recall Craig Camp making a big distinction between broth and stock with respect to making risotto.  Is this a distinction without a difference?

It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Fidelity to traditional European recipes carries with it the acknowledgment of many differences that might seem less than significant to an outside observer -- an observer who would in turn be viewed as crass, arrogant, and uncaring by those who have developed the traditions that are being dismissed. This has traditionally been a fundamental point of disagreement between Old World and New World culinary thinking.

If you make risotto with a highly extracted brown stock produced in the manner prescribed in this lesson, you will not be making something that most traditionally oriented Italian cooks would acknowledge as risotto. You may, however, be making a delicious rice dish that will be viewed as risotto by everybody else in the world. Whether or not you choose to call it risotto or believe it is risotto is less of a cooking question than a socio-cultural one.

At the same time, the beauty of the blank-slate stock is that you can fake your way through just about anything with it. For example, if you want to make a brodo (broth) similar to what real Milanese risotto cooks use, what you can do is mix half-and-half meat and poultry stock and water it down to a weaker level of concentration. This will produce an amazingly convincing fake -- good enough to fool my friends from Venice if not the ones from Milan.

My understanding is that there is quite a difference between Italian and French stock making.

Italian stock (brodo or broth) is made with a high proportion of meat -- to the extent that if you go into a butcher and say you want to make some broth,

you will probably have a few chunks of meat and some beef on the bone. French stock though can (or should?) be made with just bones and the few scraps of meat clinging to it.

Italian broth is therefore only cooked for a few hours -- since there are no bones, all the flavour will have come out in the first few hours anyway. And it is nice to drink as it is with just some pastini.

I think when you make broth in the French way, you start with stock and then simmer meat in it ; only then would you have the stock as is.

I guess the stocks we are seeing here are somewhat in the middle.

[Fat Guy]

The language issues surrounding the use of the terms broth and stock are probably beyond the scope of this lesson, because there really hasn't been any standardization. I personally think of broth as a rustic home-cooked liquid that is similar to pre-strained stock and usually gets made into a soup. Whereas stock is a strained, refined product that is destined for saucemaking or other applications where more precise control is required. But that's just how I use the terms.

Likewise, I'm not sure it's possible to generalize about Italian and French stockmaking to such a great extent. Stockmaking as I understand it is mostly a restaurant technique, developed by haute cuisine chefs as a tool for making sauces. There isn't really a home-cooking equivalent historically. But, of course, in most any culture where there's meat, a broth concept has emerged as a means of turning the scraps and trimmings into soup. In a sense, from that perspective, to compare stock to broth is to compare two different categories of food. It's not so much that broth doesn't contain bones, it's that the gelatin in the bones isn't particularly relevant to broth because the broth isn't destined to be reduced into demi-glace or otherwise used for its thickening properties. Conversely, were you to make a stock solely for its thickening properties -- which some restaurants do -- you wouldn't need to use any meat. But if you wanted your stock to be flavorful, you'd have to use meat.

Though there are regional variations that make blanket statements suspect, what I have noticed about the brodo that Italians use for risotto is that it is 1) fairly weak, and 2) made from a combination of beef and poultry. Likewise, what I've noticed about French restaurant stocks is that they vary from being based mostly on bones to being quite meat-intensive.

[Fat Guy]

Here again is where FG and I somewhat disagree. While I do not tend to add aromatics to my chicken broths (leaving them a black slate), I do add aromatics to my brown stock.

I don't disagree with that at all. It's a question of intended use. If you're going to use 100% of your meat stock for making French dishes, by all means add peppercorns and a bouquet garni (aka a bunch of herbs usually tied together in cheesecloth, with the classic set being parsley, thyme, and bay leaf). If you make the stock the way I'm teaching it, and you want to make French-style sauces out of it, you may wish to add peppercorns and a bouquet garni to a quart of it and simmer that while you're making your roux for Carolyn's part of the coursework -- I actually find that last-minute addition of extra aromatics gives a "brighter" taste than simmering them for hours in the stock and then boiling the stock for hours to reduce it (a process that tends to mute their flavor contributions). But later, if we get to a unit on, say, making Vietnamese beef soup, you may want to take some of the basic stock and add star anise, ginger, and cinnamon, and you may find the flavor of thyme out-of-place in that application. I think of it the way I think about cooking steak: I always err towards undercooking, because you can always cook it more but you can never cook it less. With stock, you can always add flavors but you can never remove them.

[Bux]

I appreciate the reasons Fat Guy leaves out herbs. I'm inclined to add a thyme, bay leaf, parsley, garlic, peppercorns, and a clove almost all of the time. I have an open mind about eating, but what comes from my kitchen tastes as if it comes from my kitchen and that's a distinct part of my theraputic process.

All canned broths are too salty to be concentrated very much, but you can deglaze a sautee pan with canned broth if you're careful and cut it with wine. Canned beef broth is not as useful as canned chicken broth.I would use canned chicken broth to braise a pot roast before using canned beef broth. I would also not add any salt until the end.

One our our few traditions, and we're not very tied to this either, is to braise a goose for Thanksgiving. The week before, I buy several pounds of duck wings and chicken bones in Chinatown and make a brown stock for braising the goose. The neck and trimmings of the goose are often added before cooking the goose, depending on our schedule.The browned goose is braised in this stock.

I'm not sure anyone else has pork stock in the freezer besides us, but we use it to poach sausages we're going to eat cold or heat up in a pan later. We also use it to poach pork tenderloins as just below the simmer. We wind up with a very juicy and flavorful, but extremely lean piece of meat which we usually have cold in salads.

[Foam Pants]

I have a stupid question. Is there such a thing as pork or ham stock? There are certainly a lot of soups that have ham as a flavor in them like those with beans or potatoes. I think red-eye gravy is also based on ham. Is there no call for ham/pork stock? Is it just that it doesn't take very long to get the flavor out of a hambone so you can toss it in the dish?

[jackal10]

[My understanding is that there is quite a difference between Italian and French stock making.

Italian stock (brodo or broth) is made with a high proportion of meat -- to the extent that if you go into a butcher and say you want to make some broth,

you will probably have a few chunks of meat and  some beef on the bone.  French stock though can (or should?) be made with just bones and the few scraps of meat clinging to it.

Depends on what is available. If you use meat, it should be meat with a large proportion of connective tissue, usually the cheapest cuts. Fillet steak, for example, besides the expense, would not make good stock.

If you use bones don't cook for more than 12 hours, or at anything except the lowest simmer, or you will get "bone taint" - off flavours as the bones begin to leach.

Also if you boil the stock too fast you will emulsify the fat into the liquid, and get cloudy off tasting stock that will not clear easily.

[JasonCampbell]

If you accept that you may omit the herbs, why not omit the root vegetables also? If you are trying to achieve a stock that fully reflects the essence of the meat, then it seems wrong footed to introduce root vegetables. They rob more than they give.

[Lord Michael Lewis]

If you accept that you may omit the herbs, why not omit the root vegetables also? If you are trying to achieve a stock that fully reflects the essence of the meat, then it seems wrong footed to introduce root vegetables. They rob more than they give.

Agreed. There is nothing simpler than making a neutral meat stock and then adding the appropriate flavourings afterwards.

Traditionally, bones have been used for stock making, but it is not the bone itself that imparts flavour to the stock, but rather the meaty elements that cling to it. Perhaps the most intensely flavoured sauces come from roasting juices; e.g. the degenerate jus gras, whereby whole chickens are roasted until dry and inedible, in order to extract the juices.

For stock, I favour chicken wings. They seem to have the correct balance between collagen and meat, thus ensuring strength without being overly gelatinous. A dark stock can be made by roasting the wings at 180ºC and simmering for 2.5 hours. Light stock for soups merely require the uncooked wings to be simmered for 1.5 hours. In either case the wings should be rinsed well in cold water.

Tomatoes and tomato paste can cause difficulties in clarification. This can be avoided by either using tomato 'water' which retains both the tomato flavour and acidity; or preparing a gastric.

[SethG]

FYI: I was in (Manhattan's) Chinatown yesterday and I stopped into a couple of the restaurant supply shops on Bowery (there's two of them on the west side of Bowery just two or three blocks north of Canal St.). There I found some aluminum 20 Qt. stockpots for about $22, as well as more expensive choices. The $22 model didn't appear to come with a lid, but they may have them-- I didn't buy because I was already loaded down with groceries. I might go back on Monday if I can figure out how I'm going to get the damn thing home.

[Fat Guy]

If you accept that you may omit the herbs, why not omit the root vegetables also? If you are trying to achieve a stock that fully reflects the essence of the meat, then it seems wrong footed to introduce root vegetables. They rob more than they give.

Three reasons: 1) It takes too long to add in the flavors of the mirepoix vegetables later on. They don't give up their flavors in a couple of minutes the way herbs do. 2) Very few people will ever use a stock containing zero aromatics for anything. The use of root vegetable aromatics is therefore a compromise: It allows for efficient post-stockmaking addition of less generic aromatics like herbs, yet it provides a base stock that is relatively common to the overwhelming majority of culinary needs. 3) In the context of the eGCI curriculum, the stocks you'll want to have are the stocks I'm demonstrating. If you just want to make stock in a vacuum, you can make it with no aromatics or with a lot of aromatics. But for every currently planned eGCI application (and, as I said, for most applications in general) you will need to add carrots, celery, and onions anyway.

[Fat Guy]

FYI:  I was in (Manhattan's) Chinatown yesterday and I stopped into a couple of the restaurant supply shops on Bowery (there's two of them on the west side of Bowery just two or three blocks north of Canal St.).  There I found some aluminum 20 Qt. stockpots for about $22, as well as more expensive choices.  The $22 model didn't appear to come with a lid, but they may have them-- I didn't buy because I was already loaded down with groceries.  I might go back on Monday if I can figure out how I'm going to get the damn thing home.

I would strongly recommend going with stainless rather than aluminum. Aluminum (non-anodized, as in the cheapo Chinatown stockpots) is very soft and if you go after it with a scouring pad or use metal implements it will scratch and, worse, turn everything in it gray. For about $8 more you should be able to get a stainless stockpot in the same size and it will be non-reactive and easier to deal with. Have a look at this topic for some discussion of the $30 Chefmate stockpots sold at Target.

[SethG]

FYI:  I was in (Manhattan's) Chinatown yesterday and I stopped into a couple of the restaurant supply shops on Bowery (there's two of them on the west side of Bowery just two or three blocks north of Canal St.).  There I found some aluminum 20 Qt. stockpots for about $22, as well as more expensive choices.  The $22 model didn't appear to come with a lid, but they may have them-- I didn't buy because I was already loaded down with groceries.  I might go back on Monday if I can figure out how I'm going to get the damn thing home.

I would strongly recommend going with stainless rather than aluminum. Aluminum (non-anodized, as in the cheapo Chinatown stockpots) is very soft and if you go after it with a scouring pad or use metal implements it will scratch and, worse, turn everything in it gray. For about $8 more you should be able to get a stainless stockpot in the same size and it will be non-reactive and easier to deal with. Have a look at this topic for some discussion of the $30 Chefmate stockpots sold at Target.

Oh. Nevermind.

Edited August 3, 2003 by SethG (log)

[Lord Michael Lewis]

Three reasons: 1) It takes too long to add in the flavors of the mirepoix vegetables later on. They don't give up their flavors in a couple of minutes the way herbs do. 2) Very few people will ever use a stock containing zero aromatics for anything. The use of root vegetable aromatics is therefore a compromise: It allows for efficient post-stockmaking addition of less generic aromatics like herbs, yet it provides a base stock that is relatively common to the overwhelming majority of culinary needs. 3) In the context of the eGCI curriculum, the stocks you'll want to have are the stocks I'm demonstrating. If you just want to make stock in a vacuum, you can make it with no aromatics or with a lot of aromatics. But for every currently planned eGCI application (and, as I said, for most applications in general) you will need to add carrots, celery, and onions anyway.

These are fair points, but as for taking too long I disagree, a mirepoix can be cut very finely, and will render its flavour extremely quickly. Convemience aside, there is no real reason to add this at the beginning of the cooking process.

In addition, the inclusion af carrots, onion or celery can detract from a stock's usefulness. Carrot and onion add sweetness, which, in the case of of Madeira or Port based sauce, can be excessive. Celery, on the other hand, considerably reduces the shelf life of a fresh stock.

While I generally make stock along similar lines to you (out of laziness), for saucing especially, a basic stock is often inappropriate.

[JasonCampbell]

I'm in agreement, a basic stock is the way to go, you want the essence of the meat, not chicken broth. I think we add root vegetables out of habit, I can make a tasty chicken stock just using chicken wings. OK and a few spring onions (scallions). The benefit of not using the root vegetables is that the stock starts out much clearer, and the chicken essence isn't fighting against the other flavours.

[Fat Guy]

If you've got no problem with committing the extra time and labor, by all means omit the mirepoix completely from the Unit 1 lesson -- you'll have an even more versatile stock base that way. In my opinion, balancing all the competing factors, the mirepoix-but-no-bouquet-garni compromise offers a good mix of efficiency and versatility. But you can tailor this all to your needs -- I assume advanced "students" will be doing that sort of thing all through the eGCI curriculum anyway. For a beginner, though, I recommend going with the procedure as outlined in the course.

[jackal10]

The classical way is to add vegetables and aromatics, although in quite small quantities

Escoffier, the ultmate authority for classical cuisine advises

for Brown stock or Estouffade

For 4 Quarts

4lbs Shin of Beef (flesh and bone)

4lbs Shin of Veal (felsh and Bone)

1/2lb raw , lean ham

1/2lb fresh pork rind (!)

3/4lb minced onions browned in butter

3/4lb minced carrots browned in butter

I faggot (parsley, celery,thyme, bayleaf)

For White Stock (and Chicken Stock), 4 Quarts

8lb shin of Veal or veal trimmings

1 or 2 chicken carcasses, raw if handy

2 Old Fowls (for chicken stock)

12oz carrots

6oz Onions (stuck with a clove)

4oz leeks

Stick of celery

I faggot (1oz parsley, 1 bay leaf, 1 small sprig thyme)

He cooks the bones for 5 hours, then adds the veg etc and cooks for another 3 hours.

Since veal is hard to get now, modern practice is to use chicken wings.

In the recent Mad Cow scare making beef bones hard to get, Pigeon was found to be a surprisingly good substitute

Edited August 3, 2003 by jackal10 (log)

[Fat Guy]

I have a stupid question. Is there such a thing as pork or ham stock?

There are no stupid questions, only stupid people . . . or maybe I got the saying wrong.

There certainly is such a thing as pork stock. And it's great! You can make meat-specific stocks for pork, any kind of game, whatever, and it will marry beautifully with dishes based on that protein -- there are also some great opportunities for flavor contrasts such as shellfish stock as the base for a sauce that will go on a veal dish.

[Lord Michael Lewis]

The classical way is to add vegetables and aromatics, although in quite small quantities

Escoffier, the ultmate authority for classical cuisine advises

for Brown stock or Estouffade

For 4 Quarts

4lbs Shin of Beef (flesh and bone)

4lbs Shin of Veal (felsh and Bone)

1/2lb raw , lean ham

1/2lb fresh pork rind (!)

3/4lb minced onions browned in butter

3/4lb minced carrots browned in butter

I faggot (parsley, celery,thyme, bayleaf)

For White Stock (and Chicken Stock), 4 Quarts

8lb shin of Veal or veal trimmings

1 or 2 chicken carcasses, raw if handy

2 Old Fowls (for chicken stock)

12oz carrots

6oz Onions (stuck with a clove)

4oz leeks

Stick of celery

I faggot (1oz parsley, 1 bay leaf, 1 small sprig thyme)

He cooks the bones for 5 hours, then adds the veg etc and cooks for another 3 hours.

Since veal is hard to get now, modern practice is to use chicken wings.

In the recent Mad Cow scare making beef bones hard to get, Pigeon was found to be a surprisingly good substitute

This is all very well if one wishes to recreate the taste of the past, but these long-cooked heavy stocks just don't work well with modern recipes.

[jackal10]

This is all very well if one wishes to recreate the taste of the past, but these long-cooked heavy stocks just don't work well with modern recipes.

FG's stock is cooked for 12 hours...

[Lord Michael Lewis]

This is all very well if one wishes to recreate the taste of the past, but these long-cooked heavy stocks just don't work well with modern recipes.

FG's stock is cooked for 12 hours...

That's fine but, as I think you pointed out earlier, it will taste of bone. In my experience, and providing the ingredients you use are small (not whole chickens or veal knuckles) then anything more than three hours simmering is uneccessary, not to mention counterproductive.

[Carolyn Tillie]

This is all very well if one wishes to recreate the taste of the past, but these long-cooked heavy stocks just don't work well with modern recipes.

FG's stock is cooked for 12 hours...

That's fine but, as I think you pointed out earlier, it will taste of bone. In my experience, and providing the ingredients you use are small (not whole chickens or veal knuckles) then anything more than three hours simmering is uneccessary, not to mention counterproductive.

I completely disagree -- a three hour brown stock in no way can compare with the complexity and richness of a 12-hour brown stock. Chicken stock is slightly different -- three to six hours is more than sufficient, but a brown stock certainly benefits from more time.

[Carolyn Tillie]

In addition, the inclusion af carrots, onion or celery can detract from a stock's usefulness. Carrot and onion add sweetness, which, in the case of of Madeira or Port based sauce, can be excessive. Celery, on the other hand, considerably reduces the shelf life of a fresh stock.

Also, again I disagree. Chicken stock essentially has no shelf life. If brought to a boil every three days, a good quantity of chicken stock could successfully last indefinitely with no ill health benefits.

[Lord Michael Lewis]

I completely disagree -- a three hour brown stock in no way can compare with the complexity and richness of a 12-hour brown stock. Chicken stock is slightly different -- three to six hours is more than sufficient, but a brown stock certainly benefits from more time.

According to Michel Roux -- Cooking a stock for longer does not make it better -- quite the reverse. Long cooking can actually be detrimental, since the stock becomes heavy and loses its savour... only veal stock needs several hours cooking (3hrs).

A stock is ready when it smells ready. When a stock smells right and you continue to cook it all that you achieve is to send the flavour up the extractor.

And please, handle the term 'complexity' with care.