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full-flavored chicken, meat, or fish stock is good enough to
serve on its own.
Stock Ingredients
Stock need not be expensive. You can start with scraps of vegetables
that you've frozen and saved over the course of weeks; I do this
routinely. Use the trimmings and ends from celery, carrots, and
onions (onion peels, especially, add a good deal of color to stocks),
and other vegetables, bearing in mind that trimmings from strong-tasting
vegetables such as broccoli and asparagus will lend a distinct flavor
to the stock, one that you might not always want.
Save, too, every scrap (except for fat, chicken skin, and fish
gills and innards) from trimming chicken, meat, or fish. Stock-making
gives you yet another incentive to buying whole chicken and cutting
it up; the meaty raw bones of a single chicken, combined with a few
vegetables, provide enough flavor for a quart or two of stock.
Of course, it's easier and arguably better—if somewhat
more expensive—to begin with fresh, whole ingredients.
Take a carrot, an onion, a celery stalk, a chicken, some
seasoning, at a total cost of less than five dollars (far less,
if the chicken was on sale), and you can make three quarts of
stock, enough for two or three batches of soup, or a batch of
soup and a fantastic risotto. Keep the simmering time short and
you can even make the soup and still have a chicken with enough
flour to be worth eating.
Almost anything can substitute for anything else in
stock, although onion, carrot, and celery should find their
way into most stockpots. But if you have turkey and no
chicken, use it. Use cooked meat instead of raw. If you
have small amounts of many ingredients rather than the
amounts specified here, substitute. Just leave out as
much visible fat as possible.
Bones, of course, are an integral part of many stocks,
and are highly desirable for the body they lend to long-simmering
stocks. But a stock made only of bones tastes like bones
rather than meat. Most raw bones are quite meaty, so that
isn't so much a problem. But if you are making a stock with
leftovers, and are using bones that have been completely stripped
of meat, buy a few chicken wings, backs, or necks, and add them
along with the bones; you'll improve the flavor significantly.
There are two extremely flavorful stock ingredients
you should choose to include or omit based on your own
taste. These are garlic and dried mushrooms. I like
the scent of garlic in many savory soups, and dishes, and
sometimes I put a whole head right into my simmering stock.
I put a whole head right into my simmering stock. But once it's
in you can't take it out, so I only do that when I'm making a
relatively small amount of stock and know that the garlic will
be a welcome addition whenever I use that stock.
The distinctive flavor of mushrooms is almost always a
fine addition, and I usually throw some directly into the
stock as it's simmering. There's really no reason not to do
this; if I'm feeling economical and dried porcini are too
expensive, I use dried shiitakes, sold as black mushrooms in
Chinese markets and very, very cheap. The trimmings from fresh
mushrooms, of course, are also good. But I don't include either
of these ingredients in my basic stock recipes because, as I said,
their inclusion is up to you.
Stock Techniques
Condensing fat
There are two special "techniques" for stock that concern
fat. The first is really more something to remember than to
learn: Don't allow stocks (or, for that matter, soups) to boil
vigorously. This is a generalization; there are times it will
do no harm at all. But once fat is rendered by the heat of
the liquid, rapid boiling can cause it to become so thoroughly
dispensed in the liquid that it will be difficult to remove it.
This not only makes for a fattier
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