Stock Options

After months of weeknights of blearily waiting well past midnight for batches of stock to cool and weekends spent simmering similar but critically different batches side by side, I answered the questions myself. And I learned quite a lot more than what most recipes reveal.

• It’s not a bad idea to befriend a butcher if you want the traditional chicken necks and backs for parts.
• If you don’t like parsley, don’t put it in your stock. Same goes for celery. They contribute bitterness and pungency that detracts from the chicken. On the other hand, whole cloves impart an undercurrent of sweetness that nicely enhances the poultry flavor.
• Stock made from freshly dug organic carrots and onions doesn’t taste appreciably different from stock made with limp carrots languishing in the vegetable bin and trimmed onion ends that were destined for the trash.
• Fat adds flavor. You can leave that skin on the chicken and then skim the rendered fat when the stock has cooled.
• Never turn your back on stock during the crucial early moments. Boiling, rather than simmering, stock is an irreversible mistake, resulting in a cloudy appearance and a correspondingly murky flavor.
• Stock is mindful of no one’s schedule but its own. Think twice before beginning a batch past 8 p.m.
• The thought of cleanup (the bones and chicken parts, the fat, the grease) inspires more dread than the mess itself merits. (But after flopping raw chicken parts about, I feel like both the kitchen and myself need to be sanitized.)
• It’s not a bad idea to keep some chicken parts in the freezer. (I confess that after the hurricane last September, while neighbors were altruistically throwing ad-hoc dinner parties inspired by the contents of their freezer, I made chicken stock by candlelight.)

And I learned one other thing. The outcome is not exactly as resplendent as, say, a chocolate souffle or as spectacular as something like cassoulet. You’re left with a layer of fat to skim, a bowl full of gray scum and a vat of pale, clear broth. Understated? Perhaps. Worth the effort? Absolutely. [Schettler]