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


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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.

CIA's The New Professional Chef says to cook a brown stock for six hours (page 439). Escoffier is quoted, "allow the stock to cook gently for twelve hours." (page 9).

We have done this before -- provide a litanny of he said/she said/my book says this, blah-blah-blah.

Let us just agree that we will all have different methods that suit us according to whom we read and trust. As an instructor (and I am speaking for me alone and will not presume to interject FG's philosophies), I believe we have all tried to provide a guideline of recipes that have become the general norm in culinary instruction.

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It might be useful to look at the chemistry here.

There are two seperate reactions going on. One is that the protein of the meat is cooking, contracting and yielding the osmazone. That happen quite quickly, as soon as the internal temperature of the meat reaches about 70C.

The other is a longer, slower process of the collagen converting to gelatin and dissolving out. That happens quite slowly, A three hour stock will not have dissolved as much as a 12 hour stock, and so will have a different "mouth feel" to it. This may be compensated by adding starches or pure gelatine later in the finished dish. Escoffier adds pig skin as a source of gelatin to his brown stock.

Of course it also depends on things like the size of the pieces of meat, wich affects how easily the fluid can penetrate. Mince will cook much quicker than solid lumps.

For very long cooking times the structure of the bones themselves begin to dissolve. The cartilage that holds the calcified matrix together will eventually dissolve, releasing the mineral into the stock. A little may add some complexity, but a lot leads to off tastes.

Three other processes are also occuring that affect flavour. TFirstly the long cooking time will to some extent concentrate the stock by evaporation. Secondly some of the aroma will also evaporate. Thirdly even at moderate heat, some of the Maillard browning relaxtions will occur slowly adding their flavour. A little is a good thing, especially in a brown stock, but eventually or if cooked at too high a heat (accelerating the reactions) the stock will taste burnt.

So it depends what you want your stock to do. A light lively flavour with little thickness, cook for a short time. This is great for light sauces, or where the stock will subsequently be heavily reduced to concentrate it. If you are adding starch, as in a veloute, this is where you might want to start. This is a typical of a white stock

For a deep brown flavour, full in the mouth, cook longer, but not long enough to get the bone taste. This stock will not need as much reduction to make demi-glace or glazes, and will add a deeper meatier "Umani" note to recipes. Perfect for jus, braises, and the like. This is what brown stock tends to be used for.

I cook my chicken (white) stock only for an hour or so. If I'm in a real hurry then 15 minutes in a pressure cooker will do it.

Brown stock cooks overnight very slowly at 90C, on the lowest possible heat.

Edited by jackal10 (log)
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Let us just agree that we will all have different methods that suit us according to whom we read and trust. As an instructor (and I am speaking for me alone and will not presume to interject FG's philosophies), I believe we have all tried to provide a guideline of recipes that have become the general norm in culinary instruction.

Amen, Carolyn.

All of this advanced suppostion, speculation and discussion reminds me of the English class where a few students have already read the book, and can't help displaying their self-styled precociousness. Just like in high school, it's at best distracting and at worst deleterious to the nature of the class, the purpose of which is, as I understand it, to teach beginners how to make stock.

I would be very surprised if anyone posting alternative techiniques on this thread didn't first do it pretty much the way FG and Carolyn will be teaching it. Over time, methods, intentions and techniques evolve. But just like learning to play piano or build furniture, you finger a lot of scales or saw up a bunch of bookshelves before you are able to practice the true craft.

I propose that we let Carolyn and Fat Guy run their class without a bunch of static. There will be time after the class for discussion.

Dave Scantland
Executive director
dscantland@eGstaff.org
eG Ethics signatory

Eat more chicken skin.

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It appears that the experts have changed their minds over the years and will change them again, if human nature remains what it is. At any rate, there remain differing opinions among professionals in many of these aspects and it's presumptuous to assume any of us has the one true answer. Above all, what I respect in this excercise is that dissent is accommodated and offered a respectable place at the stove. Once we've made our points, and explained the reasons for them, let's proceed.

Robert Buxbaum

WorldTable

Recent WorldTable posts include: comments about reporting on Michelin stars in The NY Times, the NJ proposal to ban foie gras, Michael Ruhlman's comments in blogs about the NJ proposal and Bill Buford's New Yorker article on the Food Network.

My mailbox is full. You may contact me via worldtable.com.

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We've just removed several inappropriate comments from this Q&A. Going forward, those who think so highly of their own culinary prowess that they feel they have nothing to learn here should either 1) volunteer to teach an eGCI class, or 2) stay out of the eGCI altogether. Contentious posts and attempts to hijack this learning process will be removed as will their authors. Anyone who lacks the common sense to know what is and isn't appropriate in the current setting should err on the side of caution and say nothing. Thanks.

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

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Isn't anyone going to speak up in favor of aluminum stockpots?

No?

So we're all agreed on that one? Good.

"I don't mean to brag, I don't mean to boast;

but we like hot butter on our breakfast toast!"

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Does it matter if, for the purposes of making a mirepoix, if the veggies are all cut the same size?

For a mirepoix that will be used in long-simmered stockmaking and then discarded (as opposed to a mirepoix used in quick cooking and that may even be served with a finished dish), the format is pretty flexible. If your stockpot is large enough, you can go with the largest possible chunks or a very rough chop. It won't make much difference.

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

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  • 1 month later...

I'm finally doing this class. Well, at least half of it. I'm making the chicken stock.

I am starting with 10 lbs of chicken legs and 5 lbs of chicken backs. $0.29 and .20 per pound respectively at Foodmart International in Ridgefield, NJ. One and a half pounds each of peeled & trimmed carrots and celery (not-peeled). Three pounds onion. (Food cost total: $6.14) These were divided between my 16, 6.5 & 4.5 quart pots.

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  • 11 months later...

Found this recipe for chicken stock when I followed the link from the Tom Kha Kai recipe by tharrison. I smiled to my self when I read:

"For a French aristocrat in the 19th Century, this was no problem. All your chef had to do was roast a couple of extra turkeys, crush them in a gigantic press in order to extract all the juices from them, and throw out the turkeys."

If you were a french aristocrat in the 19th Century, you more than likely, would have had no head. Whether the French peasentry disposed of the head into the stockpot is a question of Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite...

Edited by spunktubber (log)
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  • 3 months later...

I am new to Egullet, one of the reasons I signed up was for the EGCI classes. Anyway, I use a lot of College Inn chicken stock during the wintertime for soupmaking and am going to try making my own, but one thing I didn't see mentioned in this segment is the ratio of chicken parts to the other ingredients. What's a good starting point for total weight of the chicken compared to total weight of the aromatics?

Edited by Buckethead (log)
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...

What's a good starting point for total weight of the chicken compared to total weight of the aromatics?

To start, have the chicken and water be a ratio of 1 lbs chicken to 1 qt water, and the mirepoix (carrot, celery, onion) around 20% of the chicken weight.

As with anything, you can try for some different ratios with the next batch. Maybe you might want more of a veggie backbone to the stock, it's up to you, but the part about 1 lbs meat thing to 1 qt water is a good guideline.

Pat

"I... like... FOOD!" -Red Valkyrie, Gauntlet Legends-

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Ratio? Huh, wazzat? :raz:

Seriously though, I've never measured it. Although Fat Guy does have some more structured recommendations in the class, I generally put my frozen bones & carcasses, plus about 10 lbs of chicken legs* in my stockpot. Add a few peeled carrots, washed celery, quarted onions (I don't use as high a ratio of vegetables as FG as it I find it makes the stock a little too sweet for my taste), parsley, peppercorns. Fill pot with water and crank up the heat. Set timer for 20 minutes, then start skimming. Lower heat when it comes to a boil. And let it barely simmer for 8-12 hours. Strain, defat, reduce.

*My local ShopRite supermarket has these huge bags of chicken legs that are regularly priced at .59/lb, and frequently go on sale. They also have stripped chicken backs for sale, but those are .69/lb and they are frequently out of them. So, I collect chicken carcasses and necks in the freezer as part of my regular cooking and use a bag of chicken legs.

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Here's the advice I offered in the original course materials:

Quantity-wise, I recommend at least 1 pound of bones-with-meat for every 2 quarts of the size of your stockpot. That is to say, if you have a 16 quart stockpot, you should use at least 8 pounds of bones-with-meat. More certainly will not hurt. Less will result in a weaker stock.

and

For the mirepoix, the easiest thing to do is get a standard 3-pound supermarket bag of onions, a standard 1-pound supermarket bag of carrots, and another of celery, for every 16-20 quarts of stockpot space. That is to say, 3 pounds onions, 1 pound each carrots and celery for a 16-20 quart batch, or half that amount for an 8-10 quart batch. You want to maintain a ratio, roughly of 2:1:1 onions:celery:carrots. In other words the carrots and celery combined should be about as much volume-wise as the onions (you will lose some onion to trimming and peeling so your 3:1:1 purchase quantity will be more like 2:1:1 in the pot). Stock is incredibly flexible, though, so all you need to do is eyeball it.

This nets pretty close to Sleepy_Dragon's recommendations above, though with a little more veg. But what you've got to bear in mind is that the amount of water you start with is not the relevant measure of water. The relevant measure is the amount of water you end with. The stock you make will go through at least one and possibly two or three reductions: definitely while you're making it in the first place, often after you've strained and defatted it, and sometimes when you use it in a recipe (especially in sauce making).

The other issue is that you are dealing with natural and therefore variable products. Seven pounds of bones with one pound of meat clinging to them altogether is going to produce a stock that's very different from three pounds of bones plus five pounds of meat. The bone-heavy stock will have more thickening power; the meat-heavy stock will have more flavor. And no two batches are alike. Some carrots, for example, seem to have very little flavoring power -- you could fill a whole pot with them and they'd contribute little but color. Other carrots manage to impart a ton of carrot flavor, sometimes too much. Ditto for onions. And the bones and meat are variable as well, depending on all sorts of factors like the age of the animal and the amount of water weight involved.

Given the three potential stages of reduction listed above, I don't think it's a particularly big deal to add a lot of water to the stockpot at the beginning. Indeed, I think having a lot of water can probably aid in extracting flavors -- there's some law that supports this notion, diffusion gradients and osmosis or whatever. Plenty of the liquid will go away over the course of several hours of simmering.

More importantly, while it's always good to start with guidelines, you simply must learn how to taste and evaluate stock. There's no way around it. The cooking magazines and books and shows will promise you that following their recipes will yield predictable results. It's simply not true. The only way to get consistent results is to taste the stock and reduce it to the desired strength. Don't bother trying to resist this notion. Just start tasting every batch of stock and in no time you'll be a whiz at evaluation.

Unsalted or barely salted stock can be an unfamiliar flavor. It can be disappointingly "thin" tasting no matter how heavily reduced it is. I remember when I spent a week in the kitchen at Lespinasse restaurant here in New York a few years ago, and one of the sauciers asked me to taste a stock and tell him if it was the right strength or needed to be reduced more. I was absolutely unable to make the determination -- I had no frame of reference. I tasted a lot of stock that week, though, and it wasn't hard to catch on. If you focus on the aromatics and the feel of the stuff in your mouth, you'll be able to tell if you're dealing with a weaker or stronger sample. Don't rely as much on visual cues -- they can be misleading. One trick you can use is to remove a few tablespoons full of stock into a small dish and add a pinch of salt, so you have essentially made yourself a little bowl of soup. This will bring out the flavor of the stock and make it easier to tell exactly what you're dealing with, though after awhile you won't need to do this.

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

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So today I was gonna make chicken and beef stock. I've been making and using chicken stock for some time now, and I feel like I'm a pro.

However, when I was buying the beef for the beef stock (at an ethnic market, which usually has cheap packages of various bits and pieces good for making stocks) I purchased two packages of moderately meaty beef bones and one package of "costilla de res", which looked meatier but still contained bones.

Babelfish tells me this means "head of cattle rib", which doesn't tell me much. Any folks familiar with Mexican ingredient terms that can tell me if this will be okay to use in a beef stock, or might it be a type of offal that will give it an off flavor?

Don Moore

Nashville, TN

Peace on Earth

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Most often, I've seen costilla de res used to describe short ribs, but I've also seen it used to describe prime rib and spare ribs. In your case, it's probably short ribs. My suggestion would be that you remove the costilla de res from the stockpot after approximately 2.5 hours, let them cool enough so that you can handle them, cut off and refrigerate the best clean chunks of usable meat, and then put all the bones and trimmings back into the stock. Use the meat later on for hash, soup or a sandwich.

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

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Most often, I've seen costilla de res used to describe short ribs, but I've also seen it used to describe prime rib and spare ribs. In your case, it's probably short ribs. My suggestion would be that you remove the costilla de res from the stockpot after approximately 2.5 hours, let them cool enough so that you can handle them, cut off and refrigerate the best clean chunks of usable meat, and then put all the bones and trimmings back into the stock. Use the meat later on for hash, soup or a sandwich.

Fantastic! Thanks, Fat Guy. That's exactly what I shall do.

Don Moore

Nashville, TN

Peace on Earth

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  • 4 weeks later...

Does anyone see any reason not to use cornish game hens in addition to chicken in making stock? I have these two hens that I've had in the freezer for a long while and just can't seem to cook them up so I thought I might stick them in the stockpot.

Also, I have a bag of fairly hefty chicken wings...would it be a good idea to stick a few of those in with the other stuff I have as well?. BTW, by other stuff, I mean two chicken carcases where only the breast and thighs have been removed and a whole chicken. I need more to fill out the pot so looking for advice on what I'm proposing.

Thanks a lot for your thoughts.

Cheers,

Bob

My Photography: Bob Worthington Photography

 

My music: Coronado Big Band
 

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By all means, use them all. This is what the stockpot is for!

Steven A. Shaw aka "Fat Guy"
Co-founder, Society for Culinary Arts & Letters, sshaw@egstaff.org
Proud signatory to the eG Ethics code
Director, New Media Studies, International Culinary Center (take my food-blogging course)

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Does anyone see any reason not to use cornish game hens in addition to chicken in making stock?  I have these two hens that I've had in the freezer for a long while and just can't seem to cook them up so I thought I might stick them in the stockpot.

Also, I have a bag of fairly hefty chicken wings...would it be a good idea to stick a few of those in with the other stuff I have as well?.  BTW, by other stuff, I mean two chicken carcases where only the breast and thighs have been removed and a whole chicken.  I need more to fill out the pot so looking for advice on what I'm proposing.

Thanks a lot for your thoughts.

Cheers,

Bob

Thighs and legs are often really cheap here, and I add those as well. Then, you have meat, too! Sometimes I end of with more meat than I can use at that time, and have frozen the cooked chicken meat. It doesn't usually freeze well, but if you add some of the chicken fat, it keeps very well.

Susan Fahning aka "snowangel"
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Cool...thanks Fat Guy. It's going to be a rootin' tootin' chickin'(stock) makin' weekend.

While I'm here I had another question if I may. Once the stock is made and the reduction begins, at what point do you stop reducing? Fat Guy said in this Q&A to stop once you've reached the desired strength. What does that mean? Reduce to what you want the stock to taste like then it gets added without reconsitution to the sauce/dish? I thought the purpose of reducing was to save on space and when it's needed, add water and you're good to go. I guess I'm confused about whether or not to reconstitute my stock. I know volume is an issue but where is the fine line between a richly flavored sauce and volume from add'l water? In practice, the two times I've made stock since going through this course, I've added very little water to my 4:1 (approx) reduction. Does that mean my stock wasn't rich enough? On a side note, I'm going to try less mirepoix this time. I think my stock was a bit to sweet. I still have some left from the last batch so I'll be able to make a direct comparison of the effects (or affects) of this modification.

BTW, thanks Fat Guy for the great lesson. I'm starting to get really comfortable with this whole stock making thing. I find myself making stock just to get more practice not necessarily because I need more stock.

Cheers,

Bob

My Photography: Bob Worthington Photography

 

My music: Coronado Big Band
 

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Once the stock is made and the reduction begins, at what point do you stop reducing?  Fat Guy said in this Q&A to stop once you've reached the desired strength.  What does that mean?  Reduce to what you want the stock to taste like then it gets added without reconsitution to the sauce/dish?  I thought the purpose of reducing was to save on space and when it's needed, add water and you're good to go.

I think you've been doing right so far. For me, anyway, yes -- the reduction of stock just means I don't have 16 quarts of liquid in my tiny freezer. But on your other point, I <i>do</i> reconstitute it with water if making a soup, for example. But if making a sauce, I usually just wait until things are mostly reduced, then toss a couple cubes in the pan. Savory cooking is really flexible, so I'd say just go with your gut -- stuff is bound to turn out good!

Don Moore

Nashville, TN

Peace on Earth

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What are you thoughts on leaving the onion skins on?  Does it contribute to a more golden stock or does it leave a bitter taste?

I leave my onion skins on. It does make for a beautifully hued stock, and I have never noticed even a slight edge of bitterness.

Don Moore

Nashville, TN

Peace on Earth

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