Upgrading the stock portfolio

I haven’t done a gastro-porn post in awhile.  This won’t be it either, though we are building towards something…

Today’s topic is stock, as in “chicken stock” or “beef stock”.  I’ve long believed that one real difference between the food we all cook at home and the food they cook in nice restaurants, is that they always have stock on their prep-list, whereas we reach for the salt-laden cubes or other instant substitutes.  Around our house, the President’s Choice “paste” style stocks have been staples for years.  The chicken stock is passable in many dishes, but the beef stock is more like “passable in only a few select dishes where you wouldn’t taste it that much”.  Of course, passable PC chicken stock is still a pale and salty imitation of the real thing.

The butcher shop sells ready-made stock, but it’d be hard to keep up with the amount of the stuff we use around here.

Making one’s own stock at home is perceived as a time-consuming hassle.  Though it takes a lot of time, it’s really the kind of thing you can do while you’re home anyway doing more or less anything else.  I’ve decided to put stock on the prep-list, and figure if I make it often enough for awhile, it’ll just get to be habitual, and I won’t really notice the time involved.

I started 3 weekends ago with “beef” stock, made with the accumulated beef bones in the freezer, plus other beef and bison bones acquired from shops down the street.   Once the stock had been reduced to take up less freezer space, I ended up with 6 cups of concentrated un-salted beef stock.  Then the next day, I had some liquid left over from poaching chicken, and took the accumulated chicken bones in the freezer and made a few cups of chicken stock (not as many).  Last Sunday, the accumulated lamb bones in the freezer gave way to a couple of cups of very concentrated lamb stock.  Then today, it was back to chicken, since I made hardly any and it is the stock we use the most often.  For that reason, next weekend will probably be an extra large batch of chicken stock to fill up the pipeline a bit more.

That’s all well and good, but how does the stuff taste?  Very good, I’m happy to report.  We’ve made a couple of nice soups with the chicken stock, and I did a reduction of lamb stock with Pernod and tayberry jam to go with last week’s roast lamb.  With the reductions especially, it is really nice to be able to add only as much salt as you want right at the end of cooking.

One bonus with today’s stock…for about the same price as two boneless chicken breasts, I bought a whole grain-fed chicken, and cut it into pieces using the method shown in this video, and ended up with two skinless breasts plus thighs/legs/wings, and a carcass for stock.  I had tried to cut up a whole chicken once years ago, and the results were pretty hideous.  This time, I was able to get pieces that looked as nice as anything we’ve gotten from the butcher.