Stock Secrets Chefs Won’t Tell You

yes i know the title is total clock bait but if you're watching this video it means that it worked i promise to make it worth your while so it's not that chefs are keeping their stock recipes on the lock and keys so that your food doesn't taste as good as theirs you can find most famous chef stock recipes online the reason the chefs don't tell you some things about stock is because it would never in a million years occur to them that you don't understand these things just like you don't explain to a grown-up that if you drop a rock it would stay on the ground but if you drop a ball it would bounce right back you don't even explain that to a two-year-old i mean if you live on planet earth you just get that right well when it comes to stocks it's like home cooks and restaurant cooks live on two different planets at least that seems to be the case based on the questions i get from my students and viewers so today we're going to go through all these questions and really understand stuck i don't want to waste the chicken meat on stock can i use a carcass leftover from roasted chicken to make stock to answer this question i set up a little experiment i made one batch of stock with the bones leftover from roasted chickens and random other chicken dishes and i made another batch of stock with roasted chicken wings both stocks had carrot celery onions and bay leaves added to them in both cases i used enough water to just cover the solids both were pressure cooked for an hour with natural release which is roughly equivalent to three hours of summer in the regular pot after chilling both stocks were nicely gelatinous but they smelt and tasted completely differently before tasting i season them with salt unsalted stock might smell lovely but it tastes awful the stock made with roasted wings had way more aroma it smelled like roasted chicken surprise surprise and the one made from bones didn't smell roasty at all and had only a faint chicken aroma before we talk about the taste i want to remind you that you can only taste five things and chicken is not one of them what you can taste is sweet sour bitter salty and umami which is savoriness during the browning process some sweet sour and bitter compounds are created and it's not surprising that the stock made from roasted wings seem to have more taste so to answer your question about making stock from bones alone gelatin wise it's not a problem but in terms of flavor and color using meat and skin makes a huge difference also keep in mind that the amount of stock the bones of one chicken will produce will be tiny compared to what one whole chicken will produce i don't normally bother making stock with just one carcass i freeze chicken bones until i accumulate enough to justify making stock it is a great use of leftover bones and works great in many dishes but it's not nearly as tasty or all purpose as the wasteful stock i know people get very hung up on the idea of wasting the meat but i really don't think you are wasting it you're using it to produce amazing stock that can bring you great enjoyment it's just like saying that driving to a museum is a waste because it increases your carbon footprint so that you can look at some pictures but that's ridiculous way of thinking if you can't afford the gas for the car or if you have visited plenty of museums and you don't enjoy them then driving to a museum would indeed be a waste but if you have never been to a museum how would you know that driving there is a waste most people who tell me that using chicken meat for stock is a waste have never actually done it i think it's worth trying at least once in your life maybe you'll like it can i make stock out of raw chicken why do you need to roast it whether to roast your chicken or not depends on what kind of stock you want to end up with brown stock is made with roasted chicken and blonde stock is made with raw chicken both stocks have their uses blonde stock has a more pure aroma of chicken that isn't masked by browning if you're making a chicken soup that's lovely if you're deglazing a pan after a steak not so much the stock made from roasted chicken has an aroma and color that lets it blend into any meat dish like a chameleon which is not something a blonde stock can do can i remove the skin from the chicken before making stock isn't it all fat and we remove the fat in the end so why add it in the first place yes the skin is mostly fat and that's exactly why we need it the fat is the primary carrier of aroma for any animal what makes duck smell like duck and beef smell like beef is the fat that's why people consider fattier cuts to be more flavorful than the leaner cuts they have more aroma of that animal even if we skim the fat of in the end giving it several hours of simmering with the water will transfer its aroma to the stock but in case of a brown stock there is another reason when the skin is roasted not only does it carry the aroma of that animal but also all the complexity of the mired reaction that's just a fancy word for browning which makes the food smell and tastes so good your stock calls for salt-free rotisserie chickens if i can't find salt-free ones can i use salted ones that depends on how you plan to use your stock if it will be used for a soup or some other dish where you won't be boiling the heck out of it there is no harm and salt at some point you'll need to salt that soup anyway so if the stock is salted you'll just use less salt in the end but if you are reducing stock to make a pan sauce or using it in a braise where the sauce will be reduced you need to be more careful for a pan sauce your stock will be boiled down a lot i mean like eight times and it can easily become too salty before your sauce becomes at all viscous if you're using only the bones from a roasted chicken that was salted very little of that salt will transfer to your stock because most of it was on the skin and then the meat and that's already gone if you're using the entire salted rotisserie chicken you might want to taste your stock periodically if you decide to reduce it after straining once it reaches the right level of saltiness stop boiling it down and if you're using it in a pencils or a braise you'll need to find some other way to thicken those sauces you can use the flour butter paste or cornstarch or arrowroot to get them thick enough instead of buying rotisserie chickens can i roast my own chicken to make stock of course you can roast your own chickens the only reason i suggest a rotisserie chicken is convenience instead of a whole chicken i would actually suggest chicken parts that will give you a lot of gelatin in other words any combination of the wings legs and backs dry them very well with paper towels coat in a tiny bit of oil and roast at 450 fahrenheit until they are nicely browned don't forget to deglaze the pan and add all those glorious brown bits into your stock how much water should i use per pound of chicken although i'm all for weighing ingredients in this case that's kind of useless what's important is not the weight but the surface area you want your chicken and vegetables to get just covered during the entire cooking process if you're doing it in a pressure cooker you don't need to take evaporation into account because nothing evaporates in a sealed pot if you're doing it on the stove stovetop some water will evaporate during the cooking process so you can either add an extra inch in the beginning or add more water as it evaporates if your chicken is not covered it's hard to get all that gelatin to end up in the water if your chicken is covered by a lot all the texture wood is just diluting your stock if you end up with a stock that is too aromatic and too gelatinous is that even a problem i don't know that can be fixed in two seconds just add water ta-da problem solved if you end up with something that's too watery you can always boil it down but it will take time and energy the moral of the story is that water can always go in and water can always go out but the first one is quick and the second one is slow can i add powdered gelatin to store-bought or wimpy homemade stock to make a pan sauce or a braise ah yes the stock hack that most people heard about from serious it's their suggestion to spike a wimpy stuck with gelatin before using it to braise short chirps or to make a stew worked beautifully for me the sauce came out silky and rich and tasted great to the last bite but serious it's suggestion to bloom some gelatin in a wimpy stock and deglaze the pan with it to make a quick pan sauce kind of backfired the sauce looked and tasted great but after two bites it started to congeal and by the time we were done eating it looked like meat flavored fruit leather let me explain why this happened gelatin's ability to make liquids more viscous doesn't change with long cooking but its ability to turn liquid into solid gets significantly weaker in other words if you're using gelatin in a dessert get a 280 fahrenheit and take off heat immediately but if you're using gelatin in a pan sauce or a braise you need to cook it for a few hours before using otherwise your sauce will turn into leather on your plate within minutes why should i strain out the salads before reducing the stock while you're extracting the flavor and gelatin from your chicken you want to use a tall pot that doesn't allow much evaporation so that the chicken stays submerged you also need to use exceptionally low heat so that the fat and all the impurities don't emulsify into your stock a tall pot and low heat are not a good way to reduce liquid it will take days also keep in mind that some stock will cling to your chicken and will be impossible to get through the strainer no matter how long you wait or how hard you press on the solids the more concentrated the stock the more of it will cling and the more of it you'll waste that's why you want to remove those salads way before you get to that demi-glass stage and finally the question of measuring stock i have a recipe that calls for four cups of chicken stock how much of your chicken stock is that let me give you a bit of context here after i strain chill and degrease my chicken stock i reduce it roughly four times in other words i boil it down so that i have only a quarter by volume of what i started with it doesn't need to be precise you need as much precision when making stock as you need when making a sandwich there's so many reasons to reduce your stock it takes up less space in the freezer it defrosts faster because it's smaller it can be cut with a knife while still frozen because the gelatin is more concentrated making it softer in the frozen state and it makes pan sauces so much faster but what if you need to make a soup or some other dish that calls for four cups of chicken stock remember how water can go out and water can go back in at any time if you reduced your stock four times you turned four cups into one to turn it back into four cups you need to add three cups of water to your reduced stock can you reduce it three times of course but then you only need to add two cups of water if you just finished making stock and the next day you want to make a soup should you boil it down and then reconstitute it obviously not if you use any of my recipes for pan sauces you'll notice that i give you measurements in unreduced stock in other words stuff like this not stuff like this the reason for that is that i have no idea how much your stock was reduced if at all if your stock were already reduced does that mean that you should reconstitute it and then boil it down again in the pan to make your sauce of course not that would be a terrible waste of time the reason that these kinds of questions come up is that the mental model whom cooks use for working with stock is often completely wrong they treat it as if it were flour if your recipe calls for 142 grams of unbleached all-purpose flour it would be silly to convert it to cups so to try gluten free flour or whole wheat flour you don't mess with flour that is not at all how stock works when a recipe calls for stock it's the same as a sandwich recipe that calls for bread you wouldn't ask me how many grams of bread to use in a sandwich right what if your bread is thicker and my bread is thinner what if you're using baguette and i'm using a pita you need to have enough bread to cover your ingredients the bread needs to taste good and the texture of bread needs to match the texture of the other ingredients like in other words putting a burger on a baguette would be a terrible idea you should start thinking about working with stock in the same way it's an interactive experience not a lab procedure when i'm making soup i don't measure one cup of reduced stock and three cups of water i had enough water to cover my ingredients if your ingredients aren't submerged it's not a soup then i plop in some frozen concentrated stock once that dissolves i season it with salt and taste the more of the stock concentrate a lot the yummier the soup will be but good stock tastes diamond money to produce so i try to be conservative and get away with the least amount possible in some soups like the french onion i'll need a lot of stuff concentrate because i need enough oomph to match the caramelized onions but in a basic vegetable soup i can get away with very little if i'm making a pan sauce i'm not going to measure out a quarter cup of reduced stock for a 10 inch skillet the way i tell you in a video i'll plop a frozen chunk in and see how much sauce i'll end up with if i need to save the stock for something else because i'm running low i'll have to live with just a little bit of sauce if i'm feeling decadent and want more sauce i'll add more frozen stuck cubes to the pan the moral of this story is to play with your stock here are more thought-provoking culinary videos for you to check out and the link to my online classes is in the description below

Channel: Helen Rennie

Views: 394,379

Keywords: stock, chicken stock, how to make chicken stock, how to reduce stock, how to reduce chicken stock, demi-glace, how to make demi-glace, easy demi-glace, bone broth, broth, how to make broth, restaurant stock, brown chicken stock, blond chicken stock

Id: B-zgHaVakOQ

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021