Foundations: 2 - Take Stock

Stockpot and Two Smoking Barrels

Hello and welcome back to Foundations!

The idea behind Foundations is simple; I want to teach you what I know about cooking. These are the fundamentals, the building blocks, the stuff that once you understand it, will allow you to become the kind of cook who can open a cupboard or fridge and make something delicious without using a recipe. If you haven’t already, you might like to read the introductory piece explaining this project in more detail here.

---

‘Stock’ is a firm word, it sounds like a foundation. Full of architecture from the hard t’s and k’s. ‘Broth’ though, is round and breathy. A soft and steadying promise of something warm and restorative. Depending on who you ask, they can be interchangeable and mean the same thing, but others say there’s a difference depending on the ingredients or the cooking time. My 2 cents is that it’s a question of context. In an ingredients list, they’re interchangeable, but as a standalone food or major component of a dish I would use broth, because it sounds nicer (Chicken broth with spring vegetables, tortellini in broth etc).

Last week when we roasted a chicken, I mentioned how cooking meat on a stick over a fire is probably the first bit of ‘cooking’ that humans ever did. It’s quite possible that making stock was the natural next step - take all of your leftover bones and boil them up with a few other things to make it taste good. Many thousands of years later, the process hasn’t changed much. If you’ve never read it, Michael Pollan’s book Cooked explores this evolution of cooking through the elements in wonderful detail (a good Christmas present for the keen cook in your life) and the accompanying Netflix show is great too.

What is Stock?

The details depend on where you are but essentially, stock is some combination of bones/meat, vegetables and aromatics that are simmered in water to create a flavourful base for other dishes, or seasoned and eaten (drunk?) as is. My knowledge of stocks comes almost exclusively from French cooking, which is what I’ll be talking to you about today, but Chinese cuisine also employs great use of stock, as does Japan with its ubiquitous dashi.

The recipe I’m giving you today is very specifically a roast chicken stock and I’m emphasising this because it’s a very home-style stock and to make it, the only chicken bits you need are the leftovers of a roast chicken. This is different to if you were making a stock from scratch, which I’ll talk a bit about that too, because that’s how you’ll really understand what stock is and how you can make one with almost anything. You can also combine both ideas, and add some of things you might use to make stock from scratch into this version.

To start, let’s talk a bit about those three main components that make up stock.

Meat/Bones

Most commonly, this is the meat and/or bones from beef, chicken or fish, but you can make stock from pork and lamb too (and also with no meat at all, we’ll come to that). Really, you can make stock with any kind of meat/bones - the reason that beef, chicken and fish are more common is that, whilst lamb and pork stocks are delicious, they have quite strong, dominating flavours and it can be more difficult to use them in a supporting background role. Once you’ve decided on your animal, you’ve got to choose which bit to use. What we’re looking for here is a balance between texture and flavour and you will get these from different parts of the animal.

The flavour mostly comes from the meat itself, and from the bones (or more specifically, the marrow inside them). The skin, especially with chicken stock, is a great asset too, and once browned off will add a good depth to your stock.

The textural element of stock is what takes it a step further than just being flavoured water. I use stock cubes a lot and think they’re great, but there are times when a cube just won’t cut it, and this is usually why; because they can’t provide that textural element of true stock. Texture is not only important for an unctuous, silky mouthfeel but also because of what it allows us to do when we cook with the stock, it has a very physical function in giving body to sauces, risottos, stews etc.

This texture comes from two things, gelatine and collagen, and you get these from the connective tissue found in joints, cartilage, tendons, ligaments and skin. These are typically also all the bits that you don’t eat, which is why stock is such a brilliant and simple way to avoid wasting the leftovers.

The best bits of an animal to use for stock provide all of these elements, and when we’re talking about chicken that means really means wings and necks. Both are full of skin, bone, cartilage and tendons, plus some meat too. My other favourite bit of a bird for stock is the feet, which are an absolute powerhouse of inedible, chewy and boney bits that, given enough time and gentle coaxing with simmering water, turn it into silky liquid gold.

Vegetables

With French stock this is very straightforward. Blue, white, red, liberté, égalité, fraternité, carrots, onion, celery. That’s your magic trio, with sweetness from the carrot, soft umami from the onion, and a gentle aniseed clarity from the celery. Of course, other vegetables are great in stock too. Fennel is my favourite (always keep the tough outer leaves and tops for this) especially in fish stock. Leeks too, for much the same reason as onions, and mushrooms are great to add an earthy depth, particularly in vegetable stocks.

Remember though, that stock is not a bin. Not every odd end and scrap should go in there. Peel of a scrubbed carrot = good, potato peel (starchy and no flavour) = bad. The middle of a bunch of celery = good, the middle of a cabbage = bad. Cruciferous, leafy vegetables and brassicas are never good to use in stock. I failed to mention this once when I gave my housemate very rough instructions on making stock over WhatsApp, and came home to a kitchen smelling of drains and despair. Cruciferous veggies (cauliflower, broccoli etc) impart a sulphuric, eggy twang to your stock, and ‘eggy twang’ is almost never a desirable quality in anything, especially food. It won’t take much cauliflower or broccoli stalk to turn your beautiful creation into dishwater.

Aromatics

Aromatics are the signposts of stock, different flavours will point it in different directions. Warm ginger and fragrant lemongrass, smokey ancho chilli, lime leaves… there are plenty of possibilities. My advice, and what I give you in the recipe, is to keep a batch of stock quite ‘neutral’ unless you’re ok with whatever flavours you add being present in all the dishes you make with it. Then, if you decide you want to use some of it for a spicy chicken and coconut soup, just simmer the amount you’re going to use with the extra aromatics that you want present in that dish (eg lemongrass, galangal, chilli) for 20 mins. This way, you could use half of the stock for a mushroom risotto, and the other half for Thai style soup, without having to make two separate batches.

A Short Detour For a Bowl of Phở

A dish I love and eat a lot is phở, which is also based on stock. Any Vietnamese cook will tell you that a bowl of phở is only as good as the broth. Whatever else you add, be it meat or herbs or spices, nothing can compensate for starting without a good base. The origins of phở are a fascinating bit of history which are quite disputed, with Vietnamese, French and Chinese influences all suggested as a starting point. Most historians agree that phở was created in the early 20th Century, during the French colonial rule of Vietnam, but the exact origins are murky (must…resist…joke about.. clarifying stock). The beginning of the dispute starts with the origins of the word itself.

BÚN BÒ HUẾ, my favourite

You might have noticed that I have a particular soft spot for the junction between etymology and food history (RIP my short lived podcast Eatomology) which partly just stems from my love of language, but also because a name is often such a good starting point when working out the origins of a dish. In the case of phở, there are two prevailing theories:

The French theory draws from two ideas - firstly, that beef wasn’t commonly eaten in Vietnam prior to the French colonial regime, with cows/buffalo being reserved for use as working animals. The second idea is where etymology comes into play - that phở comes from the French dish ‘pot-au-feu’ (which is essentially meat in broth, although in quite a different form) both in name and substance, with ‘feu’ becoming ‘phở’. The French love this idea, obviously, but most non-French historians dispute it.

The Chinese theory argues that the dish’s origins lay in the North of Vietnam, where a number of Chinese communities settled. These settlers brought with them a dish of ‘beef with noodles’ written 牛肉粉. The idea is that this dish, and the Chinese character 粉 (pronounced "fuh") evolved in tandem to become "phở" as we know it today.

So what’s the truth? Living in France and talking about food, I was proudly told a few times that ‘the French created phở’ or ‘taught the Vietnamese how to make phở’. It’s one of those common things which people just say when you mention that you like eating it. Then they explain the whole pot-au-feu thing and give you a knowing look. The problem with this often-repeated-but-never-verified little nugget of wisdom is that it totally overlooks phở’s true origins, and also perpetuates a kind of colonial rhetoric around Western cuisines bringing ‘refinement’ and ‘technique’ to Eastern cooking. This is a a big pot-au-bullshit.

In all likelihood, the truth is probably a combination of the two. Vietnamese historians tend to split the difference, and point to a Chinese connection for the rice noodles and some of the spices used in phở, whilst the introduction of beef into Vietnamese cuisine is undoubtedly a French contribution. C’est la vie.

Stocks at Home vs in a Restaurant

‘At Home vs in a Restaurant’ could almost be its own book. In my mind, there’s so much distinction between the two in the way that I think about cooking, but that sometimes surprises an outside observer. In a restaurant kitchen, even one that cooks the kind of food I like (no foams or gels or vacuum packing) most food that ends up on a plate is a result of a series of processes that simply don’t take place in a home kitchen.

Firstly, the ingredients come from specialist suppliers and you can be really specific with what you want, so if you were making a big batch of chicken stock, you would order kilos of chicken wings, some necks and feet too, and then add in any bones from a chicken dish that you had on the menu which was de-boned, or order bones.

Then you have the difference in equipment, the big rationale ovens that let you roast large quantities of bones at once and huge stock pots to simmer everything in. This not only makes certain jobs a lot easier, but the economy of scale that you’re working at means that some things which are very worthwhile, would not be at home in small quantities.

Finally, each dish is the result of the work of many hands. Rarely is it one cook who will make every element of one dish on the menu and then also cook that dish during service. Making the chicken stock might be on person’s job, using some of it as the base of a sauce is another’s, that sauce could be warmed up during service by a 3rd cook and finally plated by the chef before it arrives at the table. At home, this isn’t a very practical way of doing things.

My understanding of cookery has been massively influenced by my time spent working in restaurant kitchens, but what I cook and the way I do it is totally different at home. This recipe is a perfect example of that, it might not be the most mind blowing thing in the world, but it is the real and honest way that I make stock 95% of the time, and I think it’s a good thing to know. That’s what Foundations is all about, the building blocks of home cooking and this is how I make stock at home.

I rarely set out to make a stock from scratch, unless I really want a big quantity for something specific, but I’ll almost always make one after roasting a chicken, or, and I encourage you to do this, keep a bag in the freezer and add the bones each time you cook a chicken. Then once you have 3 or 4 chicken’s worth, make a big batch at once. Just multiply the quantities below, but remember that spices don’t obey the laws of maths and shouldn't be multiplied like other ingredients, less is more!

The Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 Roast Chicken Leftovers (carcass, bones and wings)

• 1 Carrot, roughly chopped

• 1 Onion, roughly chopped

• 2 Sticks Celery, roughly chopped

• 1 Star Anise

• 5 Cloves

• 1 Tsp Fennel Seeds

• 1 Tsp Coriander Seeds

• 1 Tsp Black Peppercorns

• 2 Bay Leaves

Method:

Into a large pot, add all of your leftover chicken bones, the carcass and wings (I love eating chicken wings, but only if they’ve been fried or grilled. With a roast, I always save them for stock).

Add all of the chopped vegetables, spices and bay leaves, then pour over enough water to cover the whole lot, which will be around 4 or 5 litres.

Place the pan over a high heat, bring to a simmer and then turn the heat down very low. You want to keep an eye on it and once the heat stabilises, try to maintain a temperature where the stock is just very gently bubbling.

Now leave it to do its thing for 4 or 5 hours. If you like and it’s safe, you can even leave it overnight. I find it very comforting to have a nice pot of stock just ticking away in the background.

Remove the larger pieces of carcass and bone using tongs, then strain the remainder through a sieve. Give the leftovers a gentle press with a potato masher to get out any remaining liquid.

Pour the stock into a container and the stick it in the fridge. After a few hours, it should set into a nice wobbly jelly. At the same time, all of the fat will float to surface and you’ll be able to carefully scrape it off with a spoon. Keep the fat in a small container in the fridge because it’s excellent to cook with.

Stock will keep for at least a week in the fridge, and it freezes beautifully too. When you want to use it, scoop some into a small pan and warm it up until it returns to liquid. You can also add back in some water at this point if you want it more diluted, depending on how you’re using it.

Only now do you want to season the stock with salt, and remember that if you’re going to use it for a dish where it will be reduced a lot (like in a slow braise where most of the liquid evaporates) don’t salt it too much. If it going to be the base of a soup, you can salt it to taste right away.

End

That’s it! A very simple but lovely thing, which I’m sure you will make again and again. I hope you found all of this as interesting to read as I did to write. Next time you make stock, please let me know/ send a pic/ tell a friend. If you have any questions, please drop them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to go back to you. See you back here next week.