While it’s not usually a dish in itself, probably the biggest step forward most new cooks can take is to make their own stock. I’m always banging on about how good stock is so important but it really is one of the most fundamental things you can do to improve the food you make – and therefore improve your skill as a cook.
The great thing is it’s an absolute doddle to make – and you can basically let it take care of itself why you go off and make the kids’ tea, comb the dog or shoot a frame of pool – whatever you fancy.
I had an appointment this morning and picked up some chicken carcasses from the butcher on the way home. These were frozen and had been eviscerated – the breasts, wings and legs taken off for the butcher to sell separately.
Dem Bones
It always strikes me as vaguely criminal that the remaining carcass, with its reservoir of flavour stored up in bone, meat and fat, should be discarded so wantonly so I’m always happy to pick up a bag to use for my stock.
If you ever throw away the bones of a roast chicken then now is the time to stop – never, ever throw roast chicken bones away again! You’re missing out on a delicious soup, a world-class risotto or a sensational sauce.
It takes around five minutes tops to chuck the carcass (raw or cooked) into a stockpot (that’s just a large sauce pan for anyone unfamiliar with kitchen lingo). I timed myself this morning with this missive in mind and it was pretty much bang on five minutes. I’m upstairs writing this now and the stockpot is simmering away nicely downstairs.
Garnish
You’ll find lots of recipes calling for white peppercorns, bouquet garni, Chinese cabbage, bay leaves, parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme and other whatnots. These do all impact on the flavour but my general feeling is that they just make life more difficult.
A good stock relies on the flavour of the bones you put in first and foremost (unless you’re making a vegetable stock but that’s for another time) so just make sure the bones you’re using are fresh and preferably from an organically raised animal, and in the case of chicken I always go for free range.
Free range rant – skip if averse to food evangelism
Anyone with half an interest in cooking and a soul couldn’t deny the misery that goes in to mass-producing cheap chicken in battery conditions. And if you’ve got working taste buds you should be able to taste the difference – decent chicken tastes about fifteen million times better than the bland, flaccid, water-filled muck that lines the supermarket shelves.
Good ingredients are always going to underpin good cooking – and all the technique in the world isn’t going to disguise poor produce. (More on that another time)
So back to the stock…
For this time, I’m looking at a white chicken stock. Any white stock just uses raw bones with mirepoix (mirepoix is the name given to chopped up vegetables – usually carrots, leeks, celery and onion). A brown stock would require roasting the bones before boiling – this causes the bones and vegetables to caramelise creating a deep brown colour and arguably a richer flavour.
To make my chicken stock I dispense with bouquet garni or any other herbs – I cook a lot of Indian, Chinese and Thai and the addition of herbs like sage or parsley would impart an inauthentic flavour; vice versa I don’t add Chinese cabbage, lemon grass or other such fragrants because I want my stock to be as versatile as possible – you can add those flavours in later in your finished dish.
Some people put some crazy stuff into their stocks – a guy I worked with once put onion skins into the stock. Now to me that just seems wrong. In my opinion, a stock isn’t just a reservoir for leftovers, it’s a product that deserves to be treated with care and made with good ingredients. That said, if you have good quality vegetable trimmings then you should use these.
Chicken stock recipe:
1 – 2 raw or roast chicken carcasses
1 large carrot
1 small leek
1 onion
2 -3 sticks of celery
Put the carcasses in the pan. Chop the vegetables into large chunks and add to the pan.
Add water until the carcasses are covered. Bring to the boil.
Scum
Some people suggest skimming the scum from the surface once it has boiled – to be honest I’ve never really noticed much in the way of scum but if there is any discoloured foamy stuff on the surface you can skim it off with a spoon.
Heston
I usually let the stock simmer for around an hour and a half. Heston Blumenthal, I think, has claimed that you don’t really get much extra flavour after around half an hour – this may well be true but I tend to be off doing something else while the stock simmers so an hour and half gives me ample opportunity to get other things done.
Strain
How do you know when your stock is ready? There’s no obvious “done” point. The stock tends to look a little bit oily on the surface, a bit cloudy, and will taste – you hope – deliciously chicken-y. At this point Heston would probably going into paroxysms of umami-ism and he’s right – I think a good chicken stock is the epitome of what is meant by savoury and is unmistakable.
So, one you’ve left it for an hour and a half or so, strain off the stock through a sieve and discard the carcass and veg.
Reducing
You can leave the stock to cool now and then freeze or pop it in the fridge. When you come to use it there will probably be a layer of yellowy-white fat solidified on the surface – that’s normal. Unless you have some particular penchant for chicken fat you would normally scrape this off and bin it before using the stock.
At this stage you probably have quite a thin stock and what many chefs do is to reduce the stock. This has the dual purpose of concentrating the flavour and reducing the volume so it doesn’t take up so much space.
Reducing is easy – all it means is that you put the stock onto a fairly vigorous heat and boil rapidly, this has the effect of driving off the water in the liquid as steam and leaving you a richer, tastier stock.
One piece of advice, if you’re using gas make sure the flame doesn’t lick up the side of the pan – it can cause the stock to burn to the side of your pan and this can taint the flavour.
How much you reduce is up to you – I frequently reduce down to one third of the original volume. This leaves me with a greeny-brown coloured liquid that I then allow to cool and put in the fridge.
Once the stock has been the fridge for a while you’ll probably notice it’s gone into a nice jelly-like state – the gelatine in the bones causes the stock to solidify when it’s cold. When you heat the stock again it will melt and become liquid.
I always feel a strange sense of deep satisfaction when my stock has jellified – I’m not sure quite what this says about me, but feel free to speculate in Freudian or Jungian terms.
