The brown in brown sauce
(Dark) Beef Stock
A good stock is an essential to so many recipes. It will change a soup or a stew from “really good” to “transcendent”. It is the starting point from which many sauces are made, and if you are not feeling well, it’s the most comforting of comfort foods.
There are a few different kinds of stock- a light stock is made from un cooked meats, while a dark stock starts with roasting the ingredients. There are court bouillon, which are (to start) very light vegetable stocks to be used as poaching liquids. With repeated use, court bouillon becomes an incredibly rich stock in it’s own right. There are various vegetable stocks and there are stocks that are specific to regional cuisines. And there are fumés, which are fish stocks. All have specific methods, but there is a general framework.
I happen to be out of demi glace, which is a highly reduced and enhanced dark beef stock. So dark beef stock is what I am writing up first.
What you need to make a dark beef stock:
Enough beef bones and trim to fill your hugest pot 2/3
Beef bones and trim include any thing that you can find for three dollars a pound or less. When short ribs are on sale, when you make beef jerky and trim the brisket, when you have a roast and bones are left over, hell, when you serve bone in rib eye and the guests are too polite to gnaw on the bones so you don’t either. Throw it all in the freezer. I make stock when there is no room left in the freezer (then the last step is to incorporate any frozen stock that I have, so it is all the same age again), or when I run out of stock. The straight marrow bones are good (if you can resist eating the roasted marrow before it goes into the pot), but the ends of the bones where the marrow is solid or made are better, as are the sawn (exposed marrow) ribs. Short ribs and meaty trim are excellent
The classic mire poix, the triumverate of french cooking. Mire poix is a combination of carrots, onions, and celery in varying degrees of dressed up. For stocks, the heels, peels, and skins from your salad onions and celery and carrots, and the same from when you make crudités can be saved in the freezer.
The only parts I do not save are the very tops of the carrots, the leaves of the celery (they can be bitter), and the outermost dry skins and the root ends of onions. And of course, any gross bits. If you are using fresh, minimal processing is the goal:
Washed carrots, no leaves on the washed celery, and skins are OK on the onions as long as they are clean and unbroken prior.
Optional, Or if You Are Planning to make demi glace (In which case you can save a step later by putting them in now)
Tomato paste/puree and
Mushroom trimmings (back in the day, that would be the tough skins. Now it’s just the stems…the tough skin has been bred out).
The only herb you should consider in any stock ever is parsley stalks. The waste part, not the leaves. And be frugal. No bay leaves, no pepper, no salt. I started this recipe with almost four gallons of water, by the time I got to Demi Glace, I had added almost a gallon and a half of wine, and I finished with about 5 quarts. That means that a teaspoon of salt on day one would have the same effect as a two tablespoons of salt on day three.
Arrange the bones in a roasting pan with the vegetables all strewn about
My bones were frozen, so I gave them a head start,
but this is the desired result:
Into a cauldron if you have one, but any big ol’ pot will do.
Then deglaze your roasting pan. Wine is certainly an option for the deglazing liquid. Water is fine. “Deglazing” is a quick process which gets all the lovely and flavorful pan drippings into your stock, proceed as follows:
Pour off the fat. For all that is good in this world, save it. I will write an entire post on fat, and processing and using fat.
Add water (wine) to the pan, place on burners on low flames, and start scraping. When the pan is relatively clean, pour the liquid into the pot
When all of the ingredients are in the pot, place it on the stove before filling it to about an inch below the brim with (at least filtered) water. Bring it to a boil, then add water to bring the level to just below the brim, and turn down to a low simmer (the lowest possible flame where there is still motion in the pot. The bigger the pot is, and the broader, the higher the flame must be, as heat will be lost out the sides and the top of the larger pot faster than the flame can replenish it). Assuming at least a few gallons of liquid, you are looking at about 10 hours of simmer time, easy. My wife made a good point, telling me that if I suggested leaving it on overnight as I do, and someone burned their house down, I could be sued. So I am telling you to make this at least six or eight times before you decide that you are confident in your stove’s accuracy, and in your own judgement before you choose to do the same. You can break up the time, bring it to just a boil and simmer till bed time, then turn it off. Bring it back to just a boil then simmer first thing in the morning and turn it off before you leave for work. Three or four cycles like this and you will have an excellent stock.
I will say this: when I wake up the next day, the whole house smells delicious. And this is what you should have after all that time:
Turn off the heat, have your coffee and whatever. (There is no rush here, unless your kitchen is really warm, you literally have a few hours. If you are going to be gone for maybe 8 or ten, then leave the stock on when you wake up, turn the heat off last, just before you walk out the door). Then set up a pair of pots (three if they are not kind of big), one with a strainer atop it, and a big ‘ol bowl or two for the waste. With a ladle and tongs, start removing the stock and the bones into the strainer. When the strainer is full let it rest a while, then empty it into a bowl. Repeat.
Eventually you will have a few pots of stock, and a few bowls of detritus. The fat and the meat, contrary to many beliefs can be composted. But ONLY if you have a raccoon proof composter and foxes and cats to keep the rat population down (unlikely inside a city like New York (they do have compost pick up in many buildings), but on the north side of Baltimore, I have owls and foxes in my yard. And cats.) In a healthy compost, you will not even get a rancid odor. The bones, however, will just get in the way of your attempts at aeration. New York City compost takes them, but I am still trying to figure out what to do with them down here.
So. You are basically done here. You have stock. If it fits in the fridge, let it get to room temp, chill it at least overnight, then take the solidified fat off of the top-which you should save in the freezer till I write my fat post.
If it does not fit in the fridge, or you want it to be more intense, put it back on the stove. Clean the big pot that it came out of, and strain the stock back into it, through a chinoise, or a clean towel. Then put the pot offset on the stove, the off center flames will cause the stock to roll creating a “smile” of impurities and fat which are fairly easy to skim off with a ladle.
reduce as you see fit. As I am going to make Demi Glace, I am going for a fifty percent reduction. The obvious thing to do is to reduce until what is left fits in the containers that you have set aside for storage.
Heres your final picture for BEEF STOCK. Use it or freeze it, and when
I make Espagnole, an enriched then clarified beef stock, I will post and you can follow. Then I am going to make Demi Glace, a drastically reduced Espagnole, and you can do that, too.
And those posts will be along soon.
But I strongly suggest making at least a few things with your first stock. Try a beef stew, a pot roast, french onion soup, beef and barley (Scotch Broth), even just a dip (thin sliced hot roast beef sandwich: ”dip” the roast beef in hot stock before putting it on a toasted roll with sliced onions and maybe a little horseradish…I like an egg over easy on this sandwich…)
enjoy!