Taking Stock excerpt from The Missing Ingredient

This essay is excerpted from the wonderful book The Missing Ingredient: The Curious Role of Time in Food and Flavor by Jenny Linford. We recently talked with Jenny about the book and her research about time as it relateds to the cooking and enjoying of food. Read the full interview here.

The making of stock is both straightforward and satisfying, a gentle process of extracting taste and goodness from ingredients such as bones, vegetables and herbs through cooking them in water. Over that period, the water is enriched and transformed, taking on the flavours of what has been simmered in it. As anyone who has thriftily made stock from a roast chicken carcass knows, homemade stock is a flavourful base for soups or risottos. The importance of stock in the restaurant kitchen is manifest in the fact that cookbooks by chefs invariably contain recipes for it. Despite its fundamental simplicity, care and attention play their part. If clarity of a stock made from bones is sought, then very gentle simmering over a low heat as opposed to impatient boiling is required, otherwise the results will be cloudy. In order to boost flavour, some stock recipes require a preliminary frying or roasting of ingredients – whether chicken wings or chopped vegetables – to brown them. This has the practical effect of creating the Maillard reaction and so imparting an extra, umami-rich savouriness to the final stock.

The time taken to make stock varies hugely, depending on the ingredients used. Chicken stock usually entails at least an hour, and at least 2 hours when a traditional, tough old boiling fowl is being used. Thin, fragile fish bones, in contrast, require a far shorter time, classically simmered for just 15–20 minutes. In Japanese cuisine, ichiban dashi, the core stock, is made in the same time frame from dried kelp (kombu) and dried bonito flakes (katsuobushi), with great precision required over the water temperature and contact time for each ingredient. Recipes vary in details, but the overall order of the recipe remains the same. First the kelp is used to flavour the water, through either steeping or simmering. The seaweed is then removed, dried bonito flakes are added and the water is brought to full boil. Contact times at this stage are critical. ‘If bonito flakes boil more than a few seconds, the stock becomes too strong, a bit bitter, and is not suitable for use in clear soups,’ warns the Japanese food writer Shizuo Tsuji. Dashi acquires flavour quickly because, as Japanese chef Yoshihiro Murata has observed, time has been put in at an earlier stage: drying both the kelp and the bonito intensifies their flavour.

In contrast, the basic broth used for ramen is slow-cooked, made from meaty pork bones and chicken, boiled for several hours or longer. As the cult 1985 film Tampopo showed, getting the broth correct is vital to successful ramen. Rather than the clarity often sought in stock, properly made ramen broth is opaque, pale in colour, possessing a specific fatty texture much valued by aficionados. The heat and the time taken in cooking it in effect break down the bones, creating not only gelatine but emulsifying extracted solids, such as fat and marrow, into the broth to create its cloudy appearance and distinctive mouthfeel. In Western cuisine, a similar approach to breaking down the bones manifests itself in in-vogue ‘bone broth’, requiring a long simmering of 12–24 hours.

In Chinese cuisine, what is known as a red braise master stock is an important ingredient: an aromatic stock, traditionally flavoured with garlic, ginger, star anise, cassia, rock sugar, light soy sauce and rice wine, used as a poaching medium for pork and poultry. With commendable good sense, after poaching, rather than disposing of the now additionally flavourful stock, it is strained and kept for future use. Each time it is used as a cooking medium, the broth becomes even tastier. In terms of hygiene, to prevent bacteria forming, if kept in the fridge, the stock must be heated to boiling point every few days, then cooled and chilled or, alternatively, safely stored in the freezer between uses. In this way, a master stock can be used for many years. Australian chef Neil Perry of Rockpool, Sydney, uses one that is several years old, and in Chinese restaurants there are reputedly master stocks that have been passed down from generation to generation. ‘This is one of the most-used stocks in my kitchen,’ writes restaurateur and chef Kylie Kwong in her cookbook Simple Chinese Cooking Class of her master stock. ‘It is so versatile, as it freezes well and ages gracefully (just like wine).’

Much nineteenth-century ingenuity went into working on ways of providing stock in a quick-to-prepare form. Motivated by a desire to offer a cheap, nutritious food, the German chemist Justus von Liebig developed a concentrated beef extract in 1847, made by boiling beef, then reducing the liquid into a paste. In 1853 the charismatic French chef Alexis Soyer tried unsuccessfully to patent the splendidly named Soyer’s Ozmasome Food, made from concentrated meat roasting juices and designed to be used for the making of soup. With the early twentieth century came the arrival of that now everyday short-cut kitchen staple the stock cube, with Swiss company Maggi producing their bouillon cube in 1908, Oxo creating their famous beef cube in 1910 and Knorr producing their bouillon cube in 1912. Stock cubes are sold around the globe, with companies tweaking their flavour profiles for national tastes and offering cuisine-specific products, such as Knorr’s tamarind cubes for Thai cooking. Even the quickly made dashi has been speeded up: the traditional method used freshly shaved flakes from a hard block of dried bonito, requiring a special tool called a katsuobushi kezuri, resembling a carpenter’s plane. Nowadays, pre-shaved, pre-packed bonito flakes are sold. Furthermore, packets of dashi-no-moto – flavoured with bonito and available in granulated or liquid form requiring simply the addition of hot water in order to make ‘instant’ dashi – are widely used.

At the same time, proper stock continues to occupy a special place in professional kitchens. In classic French cuisine, the time taken to make stock from scratch is not begrudged. ‘Indeed,’ observed Auguste Escoffier in his 1907 work, A Guide to Modern Cookery, ‘stock is everything in cooking, at least in French cooking. Without it nothing can be done. If one’s stock is good, what remains of the work is easy; if, on the other hand, it is bad or merely mediocre, it is quite hopeless to expect anything approaching a satisfactory result.’ Escoffier’s words still hold true for French chefs to this day.

‘The first thing you learn at cookery school is the making of stock – fish stock, beef stock, chicken stock – because in France we love sauces and stock is the basis for a good sauce,’ French chef Pierre Koffmann tells me when I meet him at his eponymous restaurant Koffmann in the elegant surroundings of the Berkeley Hotel, London. A charismatic, bear-like figure, courteous yet quietly formidable, Koffmann’s voice retains a rich French accent despite decades of living in Britain. He has championed French fine dining to great effect in his adopted country, notably with his 3-Michelin-starred restaurant La Tante Claire, influencing generations of chefs who have worked with him.

Veal stock, with its delicate flavour and its silky texture, is a key stock in classic French cuisine. It takes ‘24 hours to make veal stock’, says Koffmann, talking me through the process. ‘We use veal bones because they give a lot of gelatine as they are high in cartilage. First you roast the bones until they have a very nice caramelized colour. They shouldn’t be too dark otherwise it gives a burnt taste, but nicely brown all over, so it takes time to do that.’ The bones are put in water, simmered and skimmed often to remove the layer of fat and foam that forms on the surface. Once the stock has been skimmed ‘properly’, roast vegetables and aromatic herbs are added. The stock is gently simmered over a low heat. ‘Never let it boil too fast, because it will be too cloudy,’ he exhorts. When Koffmann first came to England in 1970, he remembers, it was hard to find the veal bones he needed for stock. ‘There was something called bobby veal – the male baby calves from the dairy industry. It was the size of a dog,’ he pats the air expressively beside him, ‘they were very, very young, very gelatinous. At the time we had to use that.’

Stock, then, forms the basis for the sauces which characterize French cuisine. Many of the classic recipes that use it involve a further time-consuming process of reducing it considerably to the point of viscosity, concentrating its flavour. ‘We have a little book in France called Repertoire de la Cuisine; there are hundreds of sauces in it. A sauce is not just the stock; if you serve only veal stock, it’s just veal stock,’ Koffmann laughs. ‘The trick is to incorporate some red wine – Bordeaux – Madeira, brandy . . .’ As he talks, I see him mentally flicking through recipes. ‘For example, if you want to make a nice Bordelaise sauce, you chop some shallots, sweat them, put in the red wine and reduce it a little bit, then add some stock. You reduce it until if you take a spoon, for example,’ here he reaches forward to take a spoon from the service setting at the table to demonstrate, ‘you dip the spoon in the sauce and with your finger make a line through the sauce on the back of the spoon. If the line stays there the sauce is ready. It’s got to be the right consistency, the sauce, if it’s too watery that’s not good. If too sticky, you don’t enjoy it,’ he declares emphatically. ‘You have to taste it a lot. That’s very important; every time you make a sauce you taste three or four times. If you reduce it too much, you ruin the sauce. The meat must be good too, mind! The sauce is there to complement it, not to hide it.’ 

Stock-making, including veal, plays an important part in Koffmann’s kitchen to this day, but it is something that he feels is disappearing from contemporary professional kitchens in Britain. ‘It’s quite an expensive job to make stock, and then when you make a red wine sauce you have to use a lot of wine and the cooking time as well, so a lot of young chefs, they don’t make it any more. They might make Béarnaise, which is quick, but the long-process sauces, they are tending to disappear.’