...SOUP stock! You thought this was going to be an investing post didn't you? Au contraire!
I just got done making one of the best soups I've ever made, and I wanted to share with readers the one simple secret to making the perfect soup.
This was just a humble split pea soup with very basic ingredients: an onion, half a pound of grocery store-quality kielbasa, and a few carrots. I spiced it with some hot pepper flakes, a lot of ground thyme, black pepper and garlic powder. Nothing fancy. And, like most of the simple soups and stews we make here at Casual Kitchen, it was laughably cheap, costing something like 47c a serving.
But what made this soup taste so amazing was this: I used a simple homemade soup stock as the base.
Level up your cooking
This isn't the first time I've written about the merits of using stock rather than water or bouillon as a soup base. I want to re-emphasize this with readers, because homemade stock is easy to make and it adds something amazing, something extra, to soups and stews. It's an easy way to level up the quality of your cooking at practically zero extra cost.
Also, let me be clear: do not buy store-bought stock. It is not worth it. Almost all store-bought stocks contain sugar (sometimes in more than one form), excess salt, artificial flavors and colors and, often, MSG. Blech. Don't pay your hard-earned money for this crap when you can make far better and healthier stock at home for free.
How to make a basic stock at near-zero cost
We've shared various stock recipes here at CK in the past, but I'll share briefly here what I did to produce about 10 cups or so of pork stock, which will be the foundation of perhaps three or four batches of delicious soups in our home in the coming weeks.
First, I decided to cook up a pernil, thanks to stumbling on a doorbuster sale on pork shoulders at my local grocery store. We seasoned and roasted it according to Rosie's Pernil recipe. Then, we saved the bones, the skin and any and all leftover vegetable trimmings we happened to have on hand (often we will save up random vegetable peelings, onion ends, etc., in our freezer for this very purpose).
Then, all you have to do is put everything into a big soup pot, fill with cold water, bring to a boil, cover, and simmer gently for several hours on a lazy afternoon. Let it cool a bit, and then pour it through a colander (fat and all!) into pre-measured plastic freezer containers in sizes of your choosing. A batch of stock usually yields ten to twelve cups, which we freeze in 2- and 3-cup containers.
If you don't like pork, feel free to use bones and trimmings from roasted chicken, turkey, beef or other meats, even seafood. Or, for CK's many vegan and vegetarian readers, you can make an easy basic vegetable stock.
Here's where some readers push back. "I'm busy! I don't have afternoons to kill sitting in the kitchen watching a pot of stock simmering."
Oh, zip it, ye piteous excuse makers! It's not like you have to stare unblinkingly at the pot all day long. You can use this time to cook something else for your family, read a good book, do your taxes, work on a personal writing project, or handle some of your own personal investing. A pot of simmering stock takes just a minute or two of attention every couple of hours or so, just to check that it's simmering sufficiently.
The cost is near zero, but the rewards are priceless. You'll be astounded by the added nuance and flavor enhancement your stock gives to any soup or stew.
"Sausage stock"
A quick coda: A few months ago, Laura and her mother made a mini-pilgrimage to Buffalo, NY, Laura's birthplace and where much of her family is from. While there, they stopped in at the family’s favorite meat shop to pick up what I consider to be the best pork sausage on the face of our green Earth.
Laura brought a couple of pounds home with her, and this past weekend she cooked it up according to the family recipe: boil for an hour and a half in plenty of water.
She didn't realize it at the time, but she'd inadvertently made a big batch of sausage stock!
And she made it at zero cost and at zero extra work. Admittedly, the zero extra work part was because I did all the rest (heh). But hey, we were going to cook the sausage anyway. So instead of pointlessly dumping the "sausage water" right down the drain, I created a use for it by pouring it into a few pre-measured plastic containers to freeze for later use.
And oh what a use it was. This humble little pot of split pea soup, made with modest--even forgettable--ingredients, became something unforgettable, with a flavor literally out of this world. All thanks to a few cups of pork stock and a few cups of sausage stock, substituted for water as the soup's base. It's amazing how something so simple and so easy as a basic soup stock can pay such profound cooking dividends.
Take your cooking up a level or two: use homemade stock. I'm serious, it's magical.
Read Next: The Broken Food Pyramid
And: How To Be a Biased Consumer
Showing posts with label stock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stock. Show all posts
How to Make a Versatile Vegetable Stock
Today I’m going to post a recipe for a versatile vegetable stock that breaks almost all of the rules you’re typically supposed to follow.
I posted a much more traditional stock recipe several months ago that was fundamentally a seafood stock, but it could be based on other meats or modified to be vegetarian.
But I was entirely unsatisfied with the vegetarian version. It suffered from the same flaw shared by many vegetarian recipe modifications, which simply instruct you to leave out the meat. Thanks. How creative.
The result is that you end up with two-dimensional version of the original recipe. It’s vegetarian by default, not by design. So today, I’m going to share with you a simple stock recipe that is vegetarian by design. It’s from one of our house favorite cookbooks, Vegetarian Soup Cuisine by Jay Solomon. And best of all, it throws out a lot of the conventional wisdom for stock recipes.
Let's start off by quoting Jay Solomon himself:
"...feel free to improvise.... If you desire a piquant broth, add a few chile peppers. Ginger adds a fragrant nuance; beets turn the broth magenta. Experiment on your own, and remember, variety is the spice of life. "
Of course, traditional convention dictates that a soup stock should be mild-tasting, and should act only as a vehicle for the flavors of the dish you are making. This stock recipe, however, actually encourages you to add flavorful and creative ingredients.
Convention also dictates that a soup stock should be bland in color--again, in order to be a passive component of your dish. But here we have our friendly vegetarian expert Jay Solomon telling us to consider adding beets to our vegetarian stock for a deep magenta color! Imagine if I used this stock recipe to jazz up a batch of brown rice, or as a base for my insanely easy-to-make Mock Wild Rice recipe?
For a (former) stock traditionalist like me, this is radical, mind-exploding stuff.
And that’s what’s so great about cooking. There is always room for new challenges to the conventional wisdom. Enjoy this stock recipe and think about what dishes it could influence in your kitchen!
*********************
Versatile Vegetable Stock
(slightly modified from Jay Solomon's Vegetarian Soup Cuisine)
3-4 carrots, coarsley chopped
2 red or green bell peppers, coarsely chopped
2 large yellow onions, coarsely chopped
3-4 celery stalks, coarsely chopped
4-6 whole garlic cloves, cut in half
1 small bunch parsley, stems and all, chopped
1 bunch broccoli, coarsley chopped (optional)
6 or more cups water (enough to cover all the veggies)
1/4 cup dry white or red wine (optional)
Any other stems, trimmings or leftovers from greens or vegetables you are using.
1) Combine all the ingredients in a large stock pot, make sure all the vegetables are covered with water. Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook for 4 hours at least (7-8 hours is preferable for a rich stock). Add more water to the pot if necessary to keep the vegetables covered with liquid.
2) After you are finished simmering the stock, use a strainer to strain out the vegetables, and save the liquid (obviously). Your stock should last a week or more in your refrigerator, or indefinitely if frozen.
From the recipe:
"Here is a basic recipe, but feel free to improvise. If there are leftover parsnips, tomatoes, or stems from leafy greens, add those as well. If you desire a piquant broth, add a few chile peppers. Ginger adds a fragrant nuance; beets turn the broth magenta. Experiment on your own, and remember variety is the spice of life."
*************************
A few final notes:
1) The original recipe says to cook the stock for just one hour, but I believe a good stock should be cooked for a minimum of 4 hours and preferably more like 7-8 hours. Don't worry, you don't have to stand there and watch it all that time! Just get the pot boiling, cover it, and turn the heat down so it's at a gentle simmer. Then just check in on it once every hour or so, adding water back if too much liquid cooks away.
2) Have confidence about experimenting aggressively here. It's only a stock recipe, and by definition it will be made predominantly of water. So no matter what you do it’s not going to have that strong a taste. Feel free to take some chances.
3) I'd consider doubling or tripling this recipe if you have a large enough pot. This is a perfect example of a scalable dish where doubling or tripling the batch doesn't really require any more incremental work, yet you still get 2x or 3x the finished product.
4) Finally, consider putting the stock into a group of pre-measured containers and then freezing them. We usually freeze them in some combination of 1-cup, 2-cup and 3-cup units. This way, it doesn’t matter if a recipe calls for one cup of stock or seven cups of stock, you can combine your various pre-measured containers to match your needs.
I posted a much more traditional stock recipe several months ago that was fundamentally a seafood stock, but it could be based on other meats or modified to be vegetarian.
But I was entirely unsatisfied with the vegetarian version. It suffered from the same flaw shared by many vegetarian recipe modifications, which simply instruct you to leave out the meat. Thanks. How creative.
The result is that you end up with two-dimensional version of the original recipe. It’s vegetarian by default, not by design. So today, I’m going to share with you a simple stock recipe that is vegetarian by design. It’s from one of our house favorite cookbooks, Vegetarian Soup Cuisine by Jay Solomon. And best of all, it throws out a lot of the conventional wisdom for stock recipes.
Let's start off by quoting Jay Solomon himself:
"...feel free to improvise.... If you desire a piquant broth, add a few chile peppers. Ginger adds a fragrant nuance; beets turn the broth magenta. Experiment on your own, and remember, variety is the spice of life. "
Of course, traditional convention dictates that a soup stock should be mild-tasting, and should act only as a vehicle for the flavors of the dish you are making. This stock recipe, however, actually encourages you to add flavorful and creative ingredients.
Convention also dictates that a soup stock should be bland in color--again, in order to be a passive component of your dish. But here we have our friendly vegetarian expert Jay Solomon telling us to consider adding beets to our vegetarian stock for a deep magenta color! Imagine if I used this stock recipe to jazz up a batch of brown rice, or as a base for my insanely easy-to-make Mock Wild Rice recipe?
For a (former) stock traditionalist like me, this is radical, mind-exploding stuff.
And that’s what’s so great about cooking. There is always room for new challenges to the conventional wisdom. Enjoy this stock recipe and think about what dishes it could influence in your kitchen!
*********************
Versatile Vegetable Stock
(slightly modified from Jay Solomon's Vegetarian Soup Cuisine)
3-4 carrots, coarsley chopped
2 red or green bell peppers, coarsely chopped
2 large yellow onions, coarsely chopped
3-4 celery stalks, coarsely chopped
4-6 whole garlic cloves, cut in half
1 small bunch parsley, stems and all, chopped
1 bunch broccoli, coarsley chopped (optional)
6 or more cups water (enough to cover all the veggies)
1/4 cup dry white or red wine (optional)
Any other stems, trimmings or leftovers from greens or vegetables you are using.
1) Combine all the ingredients in a large stock pot, make sure all the vegetables are covered with water. Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook for 4 hours at least (7-8 hours is preferable for a rich stock). Add more water to the pot if necessary to keep the vegetables covered with liquid.
2) After you are finished simmering the stock, use a strainer to strain out the vegetables, and save the liquid (obviously). Your stock should last a week or more in your refrigerator, or indefinitely if frozen.
From the recipe:
"Here is a basic recipe, but feel free to improvise. If there are leftover parsnips, tomatoes, or stems from leafy greens, add those as well. If you desire a piquant broth, add a few chile peppers. Ginger adds a fragrant nuance; beets turn the broth magenta. Experiment on your own, and remember variety is the spice of life."
*************************
A few final notes:
1) The original recipe says to cook the stock for just one hour, but I believe a good stock should be cooked for a minimum of 4 hours and preferably more like 7-8 hours. Don't worry, you don't have to stand there and watch it all that time! Just get the pot boiling, cover it, and turn the heat down so it's at a gentle simmer. Then just check in on it once every hour or so, adding water back if too much liquid cooks away.
2) Have confidence about experimenting aggressively here. It's only a stock recipe, and by definition it will be made predominantly of water. So no matter what you do it’s not going to have that strong a taste. Feel free to take some chances.
3) I'd consider doubling or tripling this recipe if you have a large enough pot. This is a perfect example of a scalable dish where doubling or tripling the batch doesn't really require any more incremental work, yet you still get 2x or 3x the finished product.
4) Finally, consider putting the stock into a group of pre-measured containers and then freezing them. We usually freeze them in some combination of 1-cup, 2-cup and 3-cup units. This way, it doesn’t matter if a recipe calls for one cup of stock or seven cups of stock, you can combine your various pre-measured containers to match your needs.
How to Make Risotto
Here’s a risotto recipe that will even satisfy real live Italians with its authenticity. The sun-dried tomatoes add an amazing flavor that permeates the entire dish.***********************
Sun-Dried Tomato Risotto
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cook Time: 30 minutes
Ingredients:
5 cups of vegetable, meat or seafood stock
One medium onion, chopped
4-5 Tablespoons olive oil
1 cup rice (see note 1, below)
3/4 cup white wine (please do not use "cooking wine")
Sun-dried tomatoes, chopped coarsely (see note 2)
Parmesan cheese, grated (see note 3)
Frozen peas (optional-see note 4)
Directions:
1) Bring stock to a boil, then remove from heat.
2) In a separate non-stick pan, heat the oil on medium heat. Add the onion and saute for about 3-4 minutes until translucent (do not brown the onion).
3) Add the rice and stir until all of the rice is coated with oil. Heat the rice for 3 minutes or so, continuing to stir until the rice starts to become an opaque white color.
4) Add the white wine and stir constantly until it is absorbed, about 1-2 minutes.
5) Then gradually add the stock into the rice, starting with one to two ladles-full, then adding another ladle of stock every couple of minutes. Stir regularly.
NOTE: Do not add all the stock at once!! Instead, gradually add the stock, one ladle-full at a time. If you dump it all in at once the rice will turn out soggy.6) When the rice absorbs the liquid, add another ladle of stock. The whole rice-cooking process will take anywhere from 18 to 25 minutes, depending on the thickness of the rice grains you are using.
7) At the 15 to 17 minute mark, you can add the sun-dried tomatoes. At about the 20 minute mark, start taste testing the rice for done-ness. It should be chewy and firm to the bite (al dente for you foodies out there), but definitely not crunchy. When you think the rice is done, add in the grated parmesan along with a final half ladle-full of stock and stir until the cheese is melted and well mixed into the rice.
Serve immediately. Easily serves four as a main dish, serves 6-7 as a side dish.
*******************************
A few final recipe notes:
1) Regarding the rice: If you really want to go authentic, be sure to use Arborio rice. Arborio rice is an extra thick, short-grain rice that has more starch content than regular rice. It gives the risotto a thicker, almost creamy texture. But I’ve found that regular rice works quite well too, and of course it's cheaper and easier to find in the grocery store.
2) Regarding the sun-dried tomatoes: If you are using dried sun-dried tomatoes, add them to the risotto with the first ladle-full of stock. If you are using sun-dried tomatoes in oil, add them just about five minutes before the rice is done. The softer, oil-based sun-dried tomatoes will disintegrate if you add them at the beginning, and the DRIED sun-dried tomatoes will be too tough if you add them at the end. This is an important distinction.
3) I’m not sure what it is about grating your own Parmesan cheese—maybe it’s the cooking with love, maybe it’s a little extra elbow grease that adds to the flavor, who knows? I encourage you to take the extra time and buy a block of Parmesan cheese and grate it by hand. It's just better than the pre-grated stuff.
4) You can use other ingredients in addition to (or in place of) the peas. Some suggestions: mushrooms, pieces of ham or pancetta, seafood (such as shrimp, scallops, etc), garlic, or any of a number of different kinds of veggies (best to use mild-tasting and firm vegetables like snap peas, green beans, etc). Most of these ingredients should be added when you're about halfway through cooking the rice, say at the 12 minute mark. If you want some extra help on ways to experiment here, take a look at my series on How to Modify a Recipe.
Enjoy!
Related Posts:
Mock Wild Rice: An Insanely Easy To Make Side Dish
What's the Most Heavily Used Tool in Our Kitchen? Our Rice Cooker.
How to Make Fried Rice
How to Make a Mole Sauce: Intense, Exotic and Surprisingly Easy to Make
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How to Make a Great Seafood Stock
I know it's a lot easier when a recipe calls for "stock" to chuck in a couple of bouillion cubes and some water. Or worse, to purchase overpriced, ready-made stock from the store.
At the risk of sounding like Slave Galley Kitchen rather than Casual Kitchen, I cannot allow you to take this particular shortcut anymore. It is borderline unethical. Your cuisine will suffer for it, and you'll be ingesting excess salt. And for what--a little expedience?
The only time I'll guiltily indulge in expedient behavior like this is if I'm really, severely pressed for time and I need to crank out a dinner pronto. And even then I can't bring myself to buy ready-made stock. Instead, what I'll do is use one cube of bouillion per two cups of water for a milder, less salty substitute.
But when you do have some time, try making your own stock. Enjoy how it makes your dishes richer and tastier and yet adds no sodium whatsoever. Moreover, it's so easy to make a huge batch and freeze it up in ready-made containers that you'll never want to go back to the salt-laden pre-made stuff.
**********************
Seafood Stock:
Put into a large stock pot:
2-3 onions, quartered, leave the papers/peelings on (yes, you read that right--leave 'em on)
Several cloves garlic, smashed or cut in half (again, leave the papers/peelings on)
2-3 whole celery sticks
Any vegetable trimmings or peelings from whatever recipe you are serving
All of the shrimp shells from the recipe you're using, or use a few shrimp cut into pieces, shells and all (can also substitute pieces of fish or other seafood, or even oyster sauce if you're desperate)
Fill stock pot with cold water, add more than enough water to cover the all the stock ingredients already in the pot.
Bring water to a boil on high heat, then turn heat to medium low, set lid slightly askew, and simmer for a minimum of four hours, but as much as eight hours if you have time.
After the stock has simmered, strain it into measured amounts and freeze for future use.
*************************
Note that even though this is a stock recipe specifically for seafood, it can easily serve as a fundamental base for any kind of stock.
For vegetable stock, just leave out the seafood (duh). For beef or chicken stock, just toss in some tailings, skin, fat or bones from the meat you're using from your recipe. You can also brown any beef or chicken bones and meat in a non-stick skillet before adding it into the pot. Browning them this way will give the stock an even richer taste.
A few final observations:
1) First of all, I'll never forget the first time I tried to make stock this way. I was thinking, "seriously, you just hack the onions and garlic into a few pieces and toss 'em in the pot? You mean you just leave the peelings on?"
It seemed so.... so irreverent. But that's exactly the way to do it. Leaving the peelings and papers on actually adds to the flavor, and it saves you from having to do any prep work (who said there's no such thing as a free lunch?). Thus putting everything together literally takes two minutes.
2) Note that I don't add any spices or seasonings to the stock. No black pepper, no salt (obviously) and no cayenne pepper. The point here isn't to make something spicy or heavily flavorful. The recipe you'll use the stock in will contain its own spices. The stock is supposed to be a vehicle, nothing more.
3) This is one of the few times when you get to bend the rule to stay near the kitchen. Also, fortunately, this is a dish that scales well. Use your biggest pot and make as much stock as you feel you have room for in your freezer.
4) When I said using ready-made stock or bouillion was borderline unethical, I was just exaggerating for effect. Indulge me--I need to say things like this once in a while in order to stand out in blogland! So, if you've used ready-made stock or bouillion in the past, or if you choose to do it at some point in the future, you are not a bad person. Well, not that bad a person. :)
Stock on!
At the risk of sounding like Slave Galley Kitchen rather than Casual Kitchen, I cannot allow you to take this particular shortcut anymore. It is borderline unethical. Your cuisine will suffer for it, and you'll be ingesting excess salt. And for what--a little expedience?
The only time I'll guiltily indulge in expedient behavior like this is if I'm really, severely pressed for time and I need to crank out a dinner pronto. And even then I can't bring myself to buy ready-made stock. Instead, what I'll do is use one cube of bouillion per two cups of water for a milder, less salty substitute.
But when you do have some time, try making your own stock. Enjoy how it makes your dishes richer and tastier and yet adds no sodium whatsoever. Moreover, it's so easy to make a huge batch and freeze it up in ready-made containers that you'll never want to go back to the salt-laden pre-made stuff.
**********************
Seafood Stock:
Put into a large stock pot:
2-3 onions, quartered, leave the papers/peelings on (yes, you read that right--leave 'em on)
Several cloves garlic, smashed or cut in half (again, leave the papers/peelings on)
2-3 whole celery sticks
Any vegetable trimmings or peelings from whatever recipe you are serving
All of the shrimp shells from the recipe you're using, or use a few shrimp cut into pieces, shells and all (can also substitute pieces of fish or other seafood, or even oyster sauce if you're desperate)
Fill stock pot with cold water, add more than enough water to cover the all the stock ingredients already in the pot.
Bring water to a boil on high heat, then turn heat to medium low, set lid slightly askew, and simmer for a minimum of four hours, but as much as eight hours if you have time.
After the stock has simmered, strain it into measured amounts and freeze for future use.
*************************
Note that even though this is a stock recipe specifically for seafood, it can easily serve as a fundamental base for any kind of stock.
For vegetable stock, just leave out the seafood (duh). For beef or chicken stock, just toss in some tailings, skin, fat or bones from the meat you're using from your recipe. You can also brown any beef or chicken bones and meat in a non-stick skillet before adding it into the pot. Browning them this way will give the stock an even richer taste.
A few final observations:
1) First of all, I'll never forget the first time I tried to make stock this way. I was thinking, "seriously, you just hack the onions and garlic into a few pieces and toss 'em in the pot? You mean you just leave the peelings on?"
It seemed so.... so irreverent. But that's exactly the way to do it. Leaving the peelings and papers on actually adds to the flavor, and it saves you from having to do any prep work (who said there's no such thing as a free lunch?). Thus putting everything together literally takes two minutes.
2) Note that I don't add any spices or seasonings to the stock. No black pepper, no salt (obviously) and no cayenne pepper. The point here isn't to make something spicy or heavily flavorful. The recipe you'll use the stock in will contain its own spices. The stock is supposed to be a vehicle, nothing more.
3) This is one of the few times when you get to bend the rule to stay near the kitchen. Also, fortunately, this is a dish that scales well. Use your biggest pot and make as much stock as you feel you have room for in your freezer.
4) When I said using ready-made stock or bouillion was borderline unethical, I was just exaggerating for effect. Indulge me--I need to say things like this once in a while in order to stand out in blogland! So, if you've used ready-made stock or bouillion in the past, or if you choose to do it at some point in the future, you are not a bad person. Well, not that bad a person. :)
Stock on!
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