Q&A for Simmering the Basic Stocks - Unit 2 Day 2

[bleachboy]

Well, I tried to make the chicken stock yesterday. Heck, I even somehow managed to buy the same 16-qt stock pot that Fat Guy has (from BB&B). Anyway, it was taking an eternity on my electric stove to even start to simmer, so I left the room for a few minutes, came back, and it was boiling like crazy with a caramel-colored scum on top of the soapy bubbles. I plowed ahead anyway (what do I have to lose?) and today (after chilling in the fridge overnight in an 8-qt pot) there is absolutely no fat on top. I know there should be, I know that fat. The stock is crazy chickeny, but leaves an unpleasant greasy feel in the mouth. Is there anything I can do to correct, or did I ruin it?

p.s. I had thrown two duck backs, necks, and wings in there too, in case that might have screwed something up.

[Rachel Perlow]

Is the stock a creamy color? If so, the fat has emulsified into the stock. I don't think it can be separated out again. You can use it for soup where you don't mind the color and the fat -- perhaps a roux based "cream of" something soup -- just a make the roux higher in flour than fat to balance out the fat that is part of the liquid.

[hedoness]

I am making my stock, and aside from a few small moments of boiling, and leaving covered accidentally a few times, so far so good. But I have a few questions.

I have about 5.2 lbs of back, bones, and a few pieces. I have about 2.5 lbs onions and equal parts carrot and celery- almost typical store bags each. I followed the Joy of Cookings recommendations and added the mirepoix along with a bouqet garni (some whole clove, corriander, and dill sprigs) about 30 minutes into it, after skimming the impurities out.

OK- here are my questions:

1. Is corriander ok to put in the bouquet garni? I just liked the smell and saw it was not dried leaf (which I hear are bad in stocks- true?) so I went for it. Overall, I removed it after it started smelling kinda potpourri-ish. Do you think this step is really all that important- I figure I can add this kind of flavoring later.

2. How much in trouble am I if I left it covered for awile, and what, aside from it not reducing is the problem? Also- can I always reduce later, or are there limits on how much reduction can occur?

4. What happens if you leave your ingredients in too long? I am planning on removing the "stuff" after about 4 hours, straining and simmering again for several more hours.

5. Is there a chance of oversimmering?

I think that's about it. So far its a golden color, kinda bland tasting but very oily.

Thanks!!

C

[hedoness]

One more question (several hours later ;-))...I left my stock simmering, but it was simmering very, very low for about an hour, after reading that if it's too low this could result in bacteria. I have since strained and reduced my stock- how will I know if bacteria has accumulated? I boiled it a bit to reduce more, skimming off foam. Then I put it in a tupperware in the sink with some cold water and ice to bring it's temp down quickly- then into the fridge to defat later.

I am concerned about the bacteria, and about the fact that I have been tasting (ever since the first skimming of the impurities about 45 minutes into the cooking).

Will I be around to hear your response? ;-)

[Jason Perlow]

Bring it to a boil for a few minutes, it will kill the bacteria.

[Rachel Perlow]

Bringing to the boil will kill bacteria, but I'm sure your stock is fine. If heat was on, even very very low, it's fine. You just don't want a huge vat of stock sitting on the stove for hours waiting for it to cool naturally -- that's the bacterial play ground.

Also, I don't think 4 hours is long enough. I usually leave mine on a simmer flame overnight. If it tastes totally bland, it's not done.

Coriander is one of those herbs better added to the final stock when making a soup. If you add it to the stock as part of its flavoring, then it may taste kind of Asian and be good only for Asian soups.

[hedoness]

Bringing to the boil will kill bacteria, but I'm sure your stock is fine. If heat was on, even very very low, it's fine. You just don't want a huge vat of stock sitting on the stove for hours waiting for it to cool naturally -- that's the bacterial play ground.

Also, I don't think 4 hours is long enough. I usually leave mine on a simmer flame overnight. If it tastes totally bland, it's not done.

Coriander is one of those herbs better added to the final stock when making a soup. If you add it to the stock as part of its flavoring, then it may taste kind of Asian and be good only for Asian soups.

Phew!! I boiled the stock once it was strained and reduced it more which gave it more flavor. Now it's a bit dark, a tad cloudy :-( and a just a bit oily. I refrigerated it overnight and removed some fat off the top this morning. And you're right- the corriander was strong so I had removed it (along with clove and the rest of the bouquet garni) early in the process. I don't get why the bouquet garni is important since we will be flavoring it later, and think I will skip it completely next time.

This probably isn't good enough to throw a matzo ball into, but it might be a good base for a sauce or something. I'll freeze it anyway.

Thank you!!

[Rachel Perlow]

I'm wondering if perhaps you didn't read the class material before doing this stock? The lesson does not include herbs or spices in the basic stocks. During the Q&A, Fat Guy explained:

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.

[Pumpkin Lover]

Okie, I have a stupid question or two about the washing/pre-boiling of the bones for beef stock...

1) I only wash and pre-boil beef bones if I'm making a white beef stock? I don't have to do this if I'm making a brown beef stock (where I'd be roasting the bones)?

What I'm getting at is, if I roast the bones, do I have to purge the fat and blood out of them through boiling first?

2) If I wanted to make a white veal stock, say, do I go through the boiling purge of veal bones? Do they have as much blood and fat in them as beef bones?

[Matonski]

For the brown stock, do you try and roast all the meat/bones you are going to use, or just some of it? It doesn't look like there are 8 lbs of meat in that non-stick pot.

[fifi]

I don't know if this has come up before but I am in the midst of making chicken stock reported on the soup thread here. My comment is particular to the practice of "sweating" the chicken prior to proceeding with adding the rest of the ingredients and going on with making the stock. Obviously, you lose the advantage of retrieving the breast meat, etc. because this wouldn't work so well with whole chickens. Anyway, the aroma from this batch of stock is extraordinary so I am wondering if there is an advantage to this approach. And, I suppose I could have still dug out the breast portions but I didn't.

I gotta go to bed. The smell of this stock is killing me.

[Fat Guy]

Fifi, in traditional stockmaking the one stock where sweating is called for is fish stock. My understanding is that sweating is essentially an accelerator: by coating the fish skeletons with fat and sweating them you release flavor without browning. Since fish stock cooks relatively quickly, this step helps assure that you get more flavor out of the bones. There are some advocates of sweating chicken for chicken stock -- I believe Cook's Illustrated offers the method in its The Best Recipe series -- but it's not something I've ever bothered with. I think if you sweat you can reduce the overall simmering time and have a flavorful stock sooner, but to me that's a false saving of time because sweating requires active attention whereas simmering can happen unattended -- I don't care how long my stock takes; what I look to minimize is the time I need to spend dealing with it. Also, if you're looking for a super-aromatic stock, you're probably going to get more out of roasting than sweating.

Matonski, that photo was just for demonstration purposes. Normally you would roast all the bones.

[fifi]

Now that the deed is done, I will have to agree with Fat Guy. The final product that I have this morning is spectacular but I really don't think that is due to sweating the chicken. I went back and re-read the Cooks Illustrated article that the idea came from. It was, indeed, to save time. That isn't of interest to me since I typically "set up" the stock in the evening, then shove it into the oven at 225 degrees F and go to bed. I decided to do this on a whim. Cut up whole chickens were on special so that is what I went with. The chicken was the first thing I got out of the bag so I dumped it into the pot and put it on medium low while I dealt with the mirepoix. The verdict is that CI is correct, I would have had better stock really quick having sweated the chicken. But it wouldn't be as good as the slow simmered loveliness that I have this morning.

[fifi]

Last night, I finally got around to reducing the stock. Probably for the first time, I started really noticing what I was doing and some of that might be useful here. And, as usual, I have some questions.

First, the pots. I made the stock in my 16 quart Chefmate pot using the eGCI "recipe." Then I strained it off and it fits nicely into my 12 quart pot. So now I know what quantity I can expect (more on that later) and where to put it.

It has been in my really cold fridge with the fat sealing it off. (Still good.) Time to reduce it. I removed the fat and transferred the stock to my Calphalon Saucier. (Wowser price BTW.) I like this pot for reducing because of the larger surface area. I was getting nervous but now I know that it will hold the stock that comes out of the 16 quart pot.

I am notoriously bad about judging measurements and such and I really want to know what strength my final reduction is. That is when I got my "good idea." The pot is a straight sided cylinder so all I have to do is measure the depth of the stock as I go. I got a wooden chopstick, stood it up straight in the stock and put a pencil mark to record the depth. Then I got out my ruler and added a mark at one half and another at one quarter. My thought is that I can use my new gadget to indicate when I have a 2:1 then decide if I want to go to a 4:1 reduction. I did a happy dance at my ingenuity. But then . . . I am easily amused. I went for the 4:1 and that is just about exactly 2 quarts so now I know that my 16 quart pot will yield around 8 quarts of stock.

Why do I care? I dunno. Maybe I have been hanging around engineers too long but it is somehow comforting that I now have some data.

I was about to pour it off into my saucier when I noticed something odd. There were all of these "particles" floating around in there. There were too many of them to have been bone gunk from where the chickens were sawed in half. They were of pretty uniform size. Could it be fat that somehow "coalesced" into these things? Protein that somehow balled itself up? Does anyone know what they were? Anyway, I didn't want them in there so I strained it through cheesecloth.

I have another question that I think belongs here, about the fat. My question has to do with what you do with the fat before storing it. I think I read somewhere here that you need to "clean it up." I put the fat in a small sauce pan and added some water and let that bubble for a few minutes. I put it into a measuring cup and into the fridge. Sure enough, the water layer has those "particles" in there (guess they aren't fat). Now I am wondering if I shouldn't heat just the fat a little to drive off any water so it will keep longer. I am thinking like you would treat butter to make ghee. Is this clean up process worth the trouble? BTW, I tasted it and I will never, and I mean never, throw that chicken fat away again.

(More data . . . I got a half a cup of fat, 4 ounces. I love how all of those quantites are nice and neat numbers divisible by 4. I know, given the variables it may never happen again but it was kind of interesting.)

[Rachel Perlow]

I have another question that I think belongs here, about the fat. My question has to do with what you do with the fat before storing it. I think I read somewhere here that you need to "clean it up." I put the fat in a small sauce pan and added some water and let that bubble for a few minutes. I put it into a measuring cup and into the fridge. Sure enough, the water layer has those "particles" in there (guess they aren't fat). Now I am wondering if I shouldn't heat just the fat a little to drive off any water so it will keep longer. I am thinking like you would treat butter to make ghee. Is this clean up process worth the trouble? BTW, I tasted it and I will never, and I mean never, throw that chicken fat away again.

(More data . . . I got a half a cup of fat, 4 ounces. I love how all of those quantites are nice and neat numbers divisible by 4. I know, given the variables it may never happen again but it was kind of interesting.)

←

My chicken must be fattier than yours, or maybe you trim it more, but I get about a quart. I recently discovered at tip, on this or another thread, for removing the stock layer from the fat. Store it upside down. When everything chills, the stock will be on top. I remove most of the fat from my stock by skimming it through a strainer into a gravy separator.

The particles are just tiny bits of meat or veg that made it through the strainer. If you want a clear consomme, strain through cheesecloth then clarify.

[fifi]

Wow! A quart of fat from 8 pounds of chicken? No, I don't trim at all. And I got the last little bits of fat out with my fine mesh skimmer. These were just standard supermarket chickens. I gotta go look for the tubbies.

I saw that upside down trick but couldn't figure out how to pull that off with 8 quarts. That was one of those "why didn't I think of that" moments. I do intend to try it with braising or pan juice for instance.

[Msk]

Aother method for measuring reductions.

I keep one of my wooden spoons with a rubber band on the handle as a way to measure approximately how much I have reduced a sauce.

I put the handle in the sauce/stock, roll the rubber band to where the liquid is and now I know where it has started.

I forgot where I saw this, Alton Brown maybe?

Msk

[Rachel Perlow]

Wow! A quart of fat from 8 pounds of chicken? No, I don't trim at all. And I got the last little bits of fat out with my fine mesh skimmer. These were just standard supermarket chickens. I gotta go look for the tubbies.

I saw that upside down trick but couldn't figure out how to pull that off with 8 quarts.   That was one of those "why didn't I think of that" moments. I do intend to try it with braising or pan juice for instance.

←

Well, they were 8 lbs of mostly legs and they have the most fat of the chicken, plus I threw in some scraps from trimming & butchering down a whole pork loin, so there's some of that too. I guess I usually mostly fill a quart container. Oh, and I remove most of my fat during the simmering process and then go straight to reducing (or soup making).

Here's how I do it. I lay a handled, fine mesh strainer, at the top of the stock pot. This is before removing the solids, so the strainer keeps them out of the fat. I use a shallow ladle to skim fat into a gravy strainer. Some of the water/stock comes too, this gets poured back into the pot. As soon as the fat enters the pour spout of the gravy strainer, I pour the rest of the liquid & fat into a quart container. I do this every hour or so, until there's too little fat to bother with, then I do it again after straining out the solids.

So, the fat has been strained and there is about 4/5 fat and 1/5 liquid in the fat collecting container. This is the container that you seal and store upside down. After it chills, the liquid can be removed back into the stock. I wouldn't try to store 8 quarts of liquid upside down either!!!

[Chufi]

I have my first ever pot of dark meat stock on the stove right now. I used some sliced beef shin, which I put in the pot right at the beginning with the vegetables, and a bunch of vealbones which were roasted with some tomatopaste before adding them to the pot.

I brought the lot to the boil and then lowered the heat.

2 questions:

I only had to skim once, and even then, there was very litle scum. Does this mean I'm doing something wrong?

I am having a hard time determining the 'simmer level' This comment of FG has me worried:

I believe a proper stockmaking simmer (which is probably, technically, closer to a slow boil than a real simmer like you'd do with a braised dish) is roughly 200-205 degrees average, more or a little less depending if you measure at the top or bottom of the pot. The trick when getting your simmering speed set is to make sure you're getting some slow-boil-type behavior in places on the surface of the liquid, but that other areas are calm. This allows the fat to collect in the calm areas. If the whole surface is turbulent, the fat will emulsify into the liquid (I think I'm using the term emulsify correctly here, but maybe not) and won't be removable later without the aid of a plasma physicist and six billion dollars worth of special equipment.

←

I sure don'twant my fat to emulsify into the stock. But now I worry that my stock may be on to low a simmer. Is that even possible? When I look into the pot I see the liquid is moving (little tiny particles are moving around, mostly upward) and then there is an occasional bubble, but very occasional.

Is it better to leave it on very low, or to risk a higher temperature? Help, I don't want to be agonizing over this for the rest of the day

[Marlene]

Chufi, I find that when I do a roasted meat stock, I have less skimming. I think it has something to do with roasting the bones first. I'd leave it on low. I leave my meat stocks on for several hours and always do it so that bubbles are barely breaking the surface.

[Shalmanese]

Scum on stock is caused by liquid protein leaching out from the bones into the water and THEN coagulating to form a mat which floats over the top of the stock. If you roast the bones, the proteins have already coagulated so tehy don't leach out into the water.

Personally, I find skimming has an appreciable difference on the clarity of the stock but little affect on the taste. It's just protein after all.

[Chufi]

Thanks guys for the encouragement.

I have two large pans of stock in the fridge now. I strained through paper towels, and there doesn't seem to be much fat left. But I'll degrease, and then reduce, tomorrow.

To be continued!

[takadi]

hmm are we still answering questions?

Well just in case...

1. Does it matter when I add my aromatics? Will adding aromatics at different times affect the taste at all? If I add my aromatics at the beginning, should I remove them once they become translucent or mushy? I'm assuming this because vegetables and spices take a much shorter time to extract flavors, and I'm not sure if over-simmering can cause the flavors to dissapate or go bad.

2. Does the amount of gelatin affect the "freshness", brightness, or intensity of the aromatic flavors?

3. Can you over-simmer? If so, what happens? Does the oversimmering evaporate the flavors? Do aromatic flavors evaporate out? Does anything become "overcooked"?

4. Besides clarifying methods for consomme, what are some ways to produce a clear stock?

5. What can you do with the extra marrow and meat that's left over after cooking? I know what's left doesn't have much culinary use, but I hate to waste.

6. Does a stock reach a "maximum gelatin" saturation point where the bones stop releasing gelatins when the stock has a certain amount of gelatin? I seem to assume this, so I usually reuse the bones and make a second batch with fresh water, and combine this second batch with the first and reduce.

7. What accounts for the main flavors in stock? Meat? Bones? Aromatics? Do you need all of them, or can you leave one or two out?

These questions mostly pertain to making stock for pho noodle soup, which I have been struggling for a quite a while to get it perfect. I am having many problems...

-First, my stock always comes out bland, no matter how long I simmer for. I've used all kinds of beef ingredients, from shank bones, shank cross sections with meat, oxtail, neck bones, short ribs, beef knuckle, etc. Besides aromatics, what part of the stock creates the actual flavors? The bones? The meat? The type of bones and meat? The quality of the bones and meat? The quantity/ratio of bones and meat? Pho traditionally does not call for roasting of bones either. And it's not the amount of bones, because at one point I've actually added over 12 lbs of bones to my stock. Pho recipes also do not call for much meat in the stock either.

-Second, my stock always comes out tasting rather old or stale tasting. The aromatics have a rather funky taste and smell like it's been sitting out too long.

-I also have to add LOADS of salt and fish sauce in order to make my soup even taste like anything at all.

Yea, these are alot of questions. I am actually not an experienced cook at all, and I've only started seriously trying to improve my skills since last year. Please help the poor hungry newbie

Edited April 21, 2007 by takadi (log)

[saturnbar]

I hate to say it, but I rarely make stock, except, of course, at this time of year. I notice that Ruhlman says that you should not let stock reach a simmer, but keep it very hot, in the oven at 180 degrees, for several hours or overnight. I have no reason to doubt that this a good idea, but I was wondering if anyone knew why no simmering is a bad idea? I am also curious if this a generally recognized among chefs/ home cooks, or is it just Ruhlman's thing. ch

[Alcuin]

I think the reason to do this is because it ensures as little agitation as possible so you get a stock that's clearer and perhaps with cleaner flavors. I don't know where this idea started but I do it but not in the oven. As long as the pot is too hot to keep your hands on it but not simmering much (maybe a lazy bubble here and there) you should get a fine stock.