Making Stock

I’ve really got more than one thing on my mind with this post, but I’ll start with the stock.

I’ve seen a lot of celebrity chef and magazine recipes for chicken soup in the last month, and not one of them has anything to say about homemade stock. They recommend using skinless boneless breasts which seems less-than-ideal. Oh, who am I kidding? I think it’s an abomination, especially if you’re trying to cure someone’s cold with chicken soup! Canned stock is terrible stuff, and the cubes? You know what I think about that. I will say that the Knorr and Maggi vegetarian stock blocks are not terrible, but neither are they good. The chicken though…bad. Very bad.

If you can’t manage anything else, and you just need some hot soup, just buy the Progresso soup in a can. If you’re using canned stock and skinless boneless breasts, it’s a *lot* cheaper and it tastes about the same, unless you’re super picky about noodles being soggy.

So, making stock.

If you cook at all, you are highly likely to have onions, celery and carrots around. If you don’t cook at all, then this is going to be too much work anyway! The carrots and celery can be too wilted for snacking — it won’t matter, but don’t put anything in stock that’s not actually edible. If it’s moldy or has broken down from the beginnings of rot, it’s pretty much useless except for compost (something I wish I did, but plants die nearly instantly under my care, so it’s pointless). You *can* bag old-ish stuff up and put it in your freezer for making stock later if you just don’t have the time when the vegetables have reached that point.

Onions, celery and carrots are the basics of chicken or vegetable stock, at least in my opinion. I pretty much always have celery leaves as well since I really only use them for stew and stock. Don’t throw them out, they have a great flavor and they can allow you to make stock without parsley. Parsley is very, very nice to have for stock, however the dried stuff from your spice cabinet isn’t really useful for anything but the appearance of parsley (i.e. color). The minimum to make stock in a 2 quart pot, IMO, is 1/2 large onion, a celery heart (the white stalks and the leaves) or 2 stalks of celery, 2 carrots, salt, pepper and oil. If you’ve got an entire celery heart, you can use one carrot. You’re better off with a whole onion if you’ve got it, but you can scrape by with half a big one.

I will use almost any vegetable in stock, but there are a few things that don’t work well. Bell peppers and cabbage both contribute odd flavors and will dominate your stock. You can throw a couple outer cabbage leaves in there, but not the core and not much cabbage, generally. Red cabbage will turn stock borscht colored, in addition to making it cabbage-y.

I will use asparagus bottoms, but no other part of the asparagus, not that I ever actually have the other parts to put in. They usually get eaten! I don’t use broccoli or cauliflower either. Leave these out for the same reason as cabbage, asparagus and bell peppers – they will make the stock smell funky and will cover up any herbs you put in there. If you know you’ll be making a cream soup based on broccoli, cauliflower or asparagus those things are OK, but you might as well save those vegetables for the soup you’re making *with* this stock.

If you’ve stripped corn off of corn cobs for another recipe, you can use the cobs in here too. They will take up a lot of space though, so use a big stock pot to account for that.

I don’t use tomatoes either as I don’t make any of the soups and stews that work with that broth. Also, I pretty much never have say, one tomato that can’t be eaten fresh but isn’t spoiled. If you make lentil soup or minestrone or Pasta e Fagioli (pasta fazool), certainly put a tomato in there because it will make a positive contribution. Tomatoes, beet greens and red chard will all color your stock, so keep that in mind before tossing them in.

I do use wilted lettuce in stock as well as it’s stems and cores. There’s some in the photo above.

Be cautious with garlic unless you absolutely adore the stuff and would never thinking of making a soup or stew that did not include it anyway. I almost never put garlic in there. If I’m turning it directly into chicken soup, I might put one clove in there, but that’s it.

Even these prohibitions leave a lot of latitude.

For a two quart pot, I will use 2 T. of either butter or oil. Coarsely chop everything except chicken parts. If you’re using raw meat, toss it in and brown it gently. In my case, these were wing tips, and I was not expecting to recover any actual meat from them. For now, let’s assume you’re making a vegetarian stock. I will get back to chicken later, but for now, a note about skin: I always leave chicken skin on — if your broth is too fatty, just skim it after cooling. The rendered chicken fat can be used for frying potato pancakes or pierogi in, if you swing that way. If you don’t like chicken fat, save it and the skin to add to your cat’s or dog’s food. They will love it. If you don’t have a pet, you can dispose of it after boiling the hell out of it.

Use medium heat, and after the butter melts or the oil is sufficiently warm (add raw chicken here, then add the vegetables after the chicken is a little brown), add the onions, carrots and celery as well as raw potatoes if you’re using them. Slowly brown all this together slowly, stirring it every few minutes and scraping bits off the bottom, if necessary. It’s fine if those are brown, but *don’t* burn them. Err on the side of under-browning. After the onions are transparent, you can add water and all the remaining stuff you’ve got. I add water to equal roughly 2x the vegetables by volume, but don’t fill the pot more than 3/4 full. I usually wind up with 1 1/2 qts of stock from my 2 qt. sauce pot after straining out the cooked vegetables. If it’s a really spare stock of just onions, celery, carrots and parsley, I will get much closer to 2 quarts of stock. It’s totally do-able to just make stock from these things, so don’t hesitate if that’s all you’ve got.

At this point, add herbs, salt and pepper. I add about a teaspoon of coarse sea salt. This is very little, but you can always add more — you can’t ever take it back. I use 10-15 whole peppercorns and a bay leaf or two. I always have bay leaves, but if you don’t, don’t worry about it. You can obviously grind fresh pepper into there, but I don’t like the black bits in the stock and the peppercorns get strained out later. I also add the some of the skins from a yellow onion, which is always what I’m using anyway. They really make a the stock look very pretty and yellow. Leave out the root and top and you don’t have to use all of it to get the color.

If I have a sprig of fresh thyme or rosemary, I also add that. A few sage leaves or basil leaves are good too. You need not really prepare them, just throw them in with the stems attached. I’m still using frozen herbs that I bought rather a lot of at Thanksgiving. If you buy more than you need (and you usually have to), freeze them in a double layer of ziploc bag and use them at your leisure. If you have nothing but salt and pepper, that’s fine too – it will still be good.

If you’re starting with cooked chicken, say the remains of a rotisserie chicken, one of my favorite things to use for stock, add it now. If you’ve got a whole carcass, you’re going to need a pot bigger than 2 quarts.

Bring the pot to a rolling boil and then cover it, move it to a back burner on low and forget about it for a while. If you think of it, stir it once in a while. You can cook it an hour or two, but I don’t think it’s possible to over cook stock as long as there’s sufficient water in there. You can use vegetable stock after a 45 minute simmer, but chicken takes at least 90 minutes.

Allow it to cool so that handling the solid stuff won’t burn you. Use a wire strainer over a big bowl with a spout and strain out the cooked stuff. If you’ve made vegetable stock, use a wooden spoon or your hands to move it around, squeeze it and generally get all the good stuff out. If there’s chicken in there with meat on it, remove that to a dinner plate and then squeeze, spoon, etc.

If it’s vegetable stock, you can strain it into jars and refrigerate it. If you won’t be using it for more than a week, you can freeze it in ziploc freezer bags or ice cube trays. You’ll need to dump the cubes into something else to seal them from being freezer-y, but it will allow you to use stock in smaller amounts if you only need a little.

If you’ve got chicken to deal with, here’s what you do: separate the skin. save it for a pet, or toss it, then pick the meat off the bones with your hands. You want the chicken warm but not too hot for this as it’s a lot more pleasant if it’s not actually cold and not actually hot. If there was skin and fat on the chicken, it will soften up your hands a little, so that’s not the worst thing. If you have a cut or scrape on a hand, or if you’re wearing nail polish, wear latex gloves, but this is almost impossible to do efficiently with a knife and fork and it’s very fast with your hands. If it really won’t come off, live and learn – you didn’t cook it long enough. It should be falling off the bone when you take it off the heat.

You can either toss the meat into the broth or put it in a separate container, depending on what you want to do with it now that it’s cooked. If the process of separating this meat disgusts you, become a vegetarian. Seriously – I’m not trying to be mean, but if you can’t face the fact that this animal had bones and skin and gristle, then maybe you should think twice about eating it in the first place.

Chicken stock made with bones in it will get a little gelatinous when refrigerated. Do not panic, it will come right back. That gel property is an indication that it’s full of important vitamins and minerals from the bones, but put it in something that’s easy to get it back out of.

OK, so now you’ve got either vegetable stock or chicken stock to make almost any kind of soup you can imagine. Fish and beef stocks are way beyond me, so for that, ask Julia Child.

If you’re a vegetarian, you can use the stock as a basis for vegetable stew and put that into a pie crust or use 13″ x 9″ topped with biscuit dough or mashed potatoes. Either work, but I always go for the pie:

Another option for vegetarians is a simple noodle soup made of this broth. You can lightly brown more vegetables and then dump in the stock, or you can just boil some fine noodles in it and eat it like that.

Chicken noodle soup is the same process. You can lightly brown some more Mirepoix, then add the chicken meat and stock, bring to a boil to cook the noodles, or you can do without the extra vegetables.

In either soup, any dark leafy green shredded and added at the end is delicious. The tougher greens like kale, turnip, mustard and escarole take about 5 minutes to cook. Spinach takes about 30 seconds.

I didn’t get to the other thing, did I?