What’s my name? Nope. Still a number. I’m starting to question my self worth. Am I in the Army?

John Liu-HU, I watched the video and found it very interesting. It gave me something to think about the next time I make stock. I don't have a juicer, but the idea of the smaller pieces of vegetables is something I could do. (I actually wanted him to cook down the debris he had from the juicing too. Seemed such a waste. 😁)

Kate

Or is it like 24601?
Thinking that the next time I make stock I will use the food processor. don't have a juicer....but according to the coffee bean theory, cutting stuff finer ought to render more flavor.
Curious to see if I am who I think I am.

Army? Nope, it's time travel, into the future where everyone has a number instead of a name. And now I have that Chicago song stuck in my head, "25 or 6 to 4", LOL.

After a couple of weeks of craziness, I can now sign in and am, apparently, myself. I have to sign in every single time, though.

So I should be cutting all those vegetables into little pieces before I toss them into my stock pot? Heck, I've just been breaking the carrots and celery in half and tossing them in!

Annie

Very interesting. I'm getting used to being a number😥

Islay

HU-Liu

James Hoffman reminds me of the daydreaming nerd student that sits in the front row and continuously disrupts a lecture by asking questions that were, just moments before, answered. He had the attention of Chris Young but didn't really listen. Then had a beef with Gordon Ramsey about weight/grams yet did not consider the juice/water content in the various vegetables. Leeks have very little water weight so not much juice or flavor will ever be extracted by juicing. The sweet gorgeous flavor of leeks bloom with heat. Most of the flavor is sitting in the pulp tray.

And expensive. Doesn't make sense to juice 10 bucks of produce for a 1/2 cup of juice. He did look puzzled when he tasted his. I do wish he made a third broth with the veg pulp after juicing.

Probably a bad idea to consult Ramsey. Can't get dirt off a baseball in 20 minutes. I agree with Chris Young about cutting further to break up the cell walls for a faster more efficient extraction. Smaller cuts fill the voids needing less water to cover.

They only way to really compare is to make a proper stock via FoodLab or Serious Eats or Daniel's.

Stock should be practically free and fuss free. Saving leek tops, using root ends, clean out the crisper with a pot on the back burner to simmer. Add more veg while prepping dinner.

Like using chicken backs, necks, meaty bones....saved up in the freezer. Ina uses three whole chickens for her stock. Big ones. Not even cut up. 😬$$$

Ina. (!) Three 5 pound whole chickens (skin-on) and multiple fresh herb bunches. That is 60 bucks of liquid gold. Will 4 hours extract enough goodness from 3 whole roasters? Tossing those chickens out is bizarre. She is often wasteful cutting out circles from puff pastry and tossing trimmings aside...so it can fit her cooking cutie....she can afford it but wasteful.

Anywho, I suppose I hi-jacked. Sorry. But following so much food science myth busting...fish/shellfish stock, one hour, veg stock 1-2 hours, chicken 3-6, master stock/bone broth 6-12. All depends on your preference and how the bones are prepped/broken down ahead of time....fresh or roasted and the need/use. Lots of wiggle room for convenience by adding 4-6 or more hours but extraction only goes so far. At some point the veg/bone is dead from any provided extraction of flavor. Keeping it simmering for a while longer I will do but too far it deadens the flavor.

I never freeze any fish/shellfish stock. Small batch and use it.

I agree with most of what Sleevendog said, but I get very little stock from my saved bits in the freezer. I do make it, but for an 8 qt. batch of chicken stock, unless I have an unusual amount of backs and giblets, I will buy a chicken (if I have some backs) or two (if I have none), and usually a rutabaga, celery root, a couple of parsnips, a couple of carrots, and an onion or two. By the time it's done simmering, there's nothing but fiber left. My mother says, "All the good is gone into the soup". It's very good, rich stock. It's not free, but it's not wasteful.

I did not watch all of the video, as I make vegetable stock a different way and am happy with how I make it.

Typically, I make vegetable stock when I steam vegetables, such as broccoli and asparagus. I use a two or three tiered steaming process for this, and I put the tough stems in the bottom with the water, along with a bit of onion and sometimes some celery. I boil this for a few minutes to get the tough stems soft, and then I add the next tier above it, which would be the middle part of the asparagus or broccoli, and I slice the broccoli stalks fairly thinly for the and reserve the florets for the top, just as I reserve the asparagus tips for the top. The top tier only gets steamed for a couple of minutes, and I purée the bottom portion with a stick blender and then force it through a chinois. I then use this stock to make a velouté sauce for the broccoli or asparagus.

I like to keep my vegetable stocks simple - I do not want a lot of flavors in them, such as carrot or garlic, even though use carrot and garlic in chicken stock. This is how my Alsatian grandmother made her velouté sauces for her vegetables.

That was interesting. If I owned a juicer I'd probably try it, lol. I guess I'm lazy. I save scraps in my freezer until canning season is over, toss it all in a giant pot, stick it on the back of the cookstove and let it simmer, then strain und simmer down until the consistency is like Better Than Bouillon. No cruciferous veg or corn (too sweet), a little carrot (also too sweet) and garlic, onion, celery, mushrooms, some tomato (peels left from canning), maybe greens or green beans. I've even thrown in dehydrated or frozen vegies that need to be rotated out. The end result doesn't freeze solid, so it's easy to spoon out.

Veg stock is something I don’t keep around, commercial is unsatisfactory, and I don’t save ends and trimmings, so am interested in a fast and efficient way to make it.

The scenario for me would be I get a sudden zeal for veg soup, run to store, return with a bag of veg, what is the fastest way I can make scratch stock then the soup - ideally 30 minutes from setting down the grocery bag to serving soup.

I’ve experimented with shredding stock ingredients in the food processor before cooking. It works great for flavor. I’ve even liquified raw chicken in the blender to make chicken stock. However, the flavor comes at the expense of a cloudy stock.

The various techniques for clarification of stock don’t work for me. Straining, filtering, egg rafts, do very little. The trick of freezing then slowly thawing is just too involved. So the idea of juicing is interesting for clarity as well as speed and maybe economy.

If combined with pressure cooking, maybe the 30 minute clear, intensely flavored vegetable soup from scratch is feasible.

I never understood the Ina Garten chicken stock recipe, seems absurdly wasteful. Maybe if you then do something with the whole chickens - slice them for sandwich meat etc - it might be acceptable.

Katie C, your DIY stock concentrate looks amazing. I wish I had the patience and planning to do that. I used to make demi-glace every year, but it turns out I’m more of a grasshopper than an ant, cooking wise.

Hoffman is great with coffee vids. I have personally never sustained interest in the deeper caverns of coffee-dom - examining your grinds with a microscope, sieving to uni-modal consistency, measuring extraction solids with a refractometer, programming flow parameters into a computerized espresso machine, etc. I like shiny old Italian machines, dark roast beans, and quickly banging out shots and lattes for a crowd. However, I enjoy watching someone else down in the rabbit hole.

Maybe he’s running out of coffee topics.

John, I don't know about Ina, for sure, but you wouldn't want to try to eat the chicken from my chicken stock. It's not chicken anymore. It's fibrous strings. All the chicken goodness is in the stock, including much of the good from the bones. There's nothing edible left solid.

I think the pressure cooker is likely the best answer for your instant veggie stock. Mine, boiled the old fashioned way, takes an hour or two. Whirring it up makes the fibers too small to strain, though I'm surprised the egg clarification didn't work. There were probably just more solids than the egg could cope with. The problem with the egg clarification, anyway, is that it takes away the nutritious bits along with the solids. Not processing the ingredients and rough cutting them makes it easy to strain without needing to clarify. The vegetables give up their good anyway, though, of course, some of the vitamins don't like water and heat. Still, if 50% leave, that means that 50% stay. That thought comforts me. :)

plllog, because I am either thrifty or lazy, I often eat the meat and veg left over after making stock.

I don’t serve it to anyone - there are more interesting ways to offend friends, my children are distrustful of my “thrifty cooking experiments” after the spleen pate and stuffed pork heart traumas of their childhood, which you’d think involved beatings the way they tell it now, and SWMBO can be quick to anger when she thinks she’s being poisoned.

The solitary consumption usually takes place at 2 am when I can’t sleep.

There is “some” flavor. I mean, I can tell that I’m not eating boiled packing materials.

This offal is more suited for a dog or chickens or something, but as I have none and my cats won’t touch it, the work is left to me.

On clarity, I’ve often wanted to make perfectly clear - at most, toothsomely tinted - broth to use in experimental mixed drinks. I can sort of do this with bones, and bone broth mixes nicely with bourbon as it turns out. In fact, a glass of rich broth is a nice beverage on its own, and I recall once hearing of a Manhattan bar that served it. To mix with vodka, rum or gin - imagine, for instance, a Bloody Mary that is also a hearty meal! - it feels like veg stock would be better. I realize that “better” is relative.

John, when I make chicken stock I pull the meat when it's just done, pick the meat from the bones and skin and set aside; the bones, gristle, skin and fat all go back into the pot to cook for a couple more hours. I certainly don't usually waste the chicken meat by cooking it to death.

Kate

But....that's the whole point! That the chicken is in the stock, not in the carcass anymore!

I make a one hour chicken soup.

1. Come home with a whole chicken and veg. 2. Remove the breasts and legs, carcass in pressure cooker with some veg. 3. High pressure for 15 min. 4. Meanwhile, cube up the meat and dice other veg. 5. Release pressure, strain stock, add cubed meat and diced veg. 6. High pressure for 15 min. Done. 7. If adding noodles or rice, I’ll ladle out some stock in step 5 and cook the grains separately during step 6.

There is something unseemly about rushing over soup, and not giving the flavors time to meld or whatever. Still, this is fast and handy when people get a cold or flu and want a dose of chicken soup STAT.

Of course, no-one gets colds or flu now, with all the Covid measures, less infectious diseases are in hibernation.

- HU Liu

I think I’m going to make chicken soup tomorrow. We are back to rain, thank goodness, and that means soup weather!

HU John Liu

Heavy rain here all night. The dogwoods exploded.

We juice nearly every weekend. Enough to keep a dozen or so juice bottles in the freezer in rotation. I have used those in soups like tomato and vegetable, chicken.

Ina's 60$ stock, HERE ...3 five pound whole chickens. In my home that is 30 chicken parts, (cutting the brea*ts in half being so large. If I made a stock today, I would not hesitate to add a couple whole bone in thighs I have in the freezer with other meaty bones, chicken backs, etc.

I make a few various stocks depending on the use. The main master stock I've made for years is explained via Alex, 'the French guy'. HERE. Good on its own or a tBsp of miso stirred in...a nice base for just about any of the soups we make. Sometimes just a chicken stock using un-roasted veg.

Copper pan lovers nerd allert. Alex traveled to Istanbul to visit a coppersmith who uses silver instead of a tin lining.....(I want one😬)...link HERE

Pan porn! NSFW! Gorgeous.

When we have a fundraiser at church with hot turkey sandwiches with gravy for 250, I roast the turkeys, carefully save the drippings, remove the meat from the bone and put the drippings, bones and skin in a huge pot with 3 or 4 rough chopped onions, about 5 peeled cloves of garlic, a couple of rough chopped carrots, the green leaves from a couple of bunches of celery for the potato salad, the stems of the parsley that will be a garnish, and 5 or 6 of the lemon rinds from one of the desserts and water to cover.
Simmer all day, and strain and refrigerate before leaving the church at 5. The next morning it is like 'you can walk on"....warm, thicken with flour and season for gravy, or freeze for stock for later.
Nothing wasted but an onion or 3 and a carrot. The meat is saved for a salad or for the sandwich which will be served with the hot gravy.

Be careful because lots of turkeys are treated with a saline solution and it could get too salty!

No 'myth busting' about stocks. No need to reinvent the wheel to 'square'. One half to one hour for shellfish, ...one hour to another half for fish stock...two to three for vegan, vegetarian, keto...(roasted veg or fresh blonde stock). Chicken 4-6, beef/bone....6-12 or more. All depending on preference and the available produce...lots of wiggle room. No rules. Just make it easy on the back burner.

Like mentioned, extraction has a time where nothing will give any veg or protein or any bits of flavor...it is 'spent' like pillog and others agree.

Stock to us is a resourceful use of wasteful tops and bits and useless ends of usually garbage but full of flavor. It should be an easy back burner while cooking another nights meal....like Linda posted about parsley stems. Full of flavor for a stock, but not edible being so tough in a meal.

Once a cuisinart, a juicer, ...hits the counter and needs cleaning it gets more than most want to deal with. Unless the meal that night has the appliance out anyway without cleaning....a blender making humus...,empty with spatula, then add more vinegar, oil and lemon for a dressing.

Dancing to NewOrleans JazzFest playing in the kitchen. John Liu Hu might enjoy WWOZ. (we use Alexa). They are playing music events from the 70's and on. A few live events this week. A shame the 'fest' at the fairgrounds is not happening this year like 2020 and lost another covid season event 2021. Great radio as WWOZ does not ever disappoint. Any day of the year....

I'm using a master pint stock from the freezer...Dashi/kombu...shaved beef, marinated tofu...and whatever the crisper drawer gives. Pea shoots, snow peas, winging it...

Maybe it's a Jewish Mother thing. We don't consider the meat "wasted" once all the good is transferred to the stock. This is the famous Jewish Chicken Soup--take the stock, some diced freshly cooked chicken, maybe those un-laid egg things I forget the name of, some diced veg, parsley leaves and seasoning, and you get wholesome, healing soup,, but just add a little seasoning and your have broth. Build any soup on it and the protein is already there.

Short on veg, we might just use a couple of carrots or a yellow onion to give it some color, but the quantity of chicken, whether backs, necks and feet, or whole, is indispensible.

There's another kind from the past when chickens were very dear (when "a chicken in every pot" meant luxury), when they'd boil a chicken for Friday night dinner, but not to waste the water from the boil, they'd make a thin soup from that with some vegetables added. That was about not having a better way than boiling to cook the chicken, and not wasting what escaped, the drippings, rather than a question of whether making a rich stock were "wasteful".

I'm not trying to pursued anyone else to do it my way--which includes a 20 qt. stock pot and double straining to get rid of the fluff, and is meant for stocking the freezer with stock. Just please understand that boiling it up for 5-6 hrs., as Sleevendog said, gives you a different thing, and one that some of us value.

Inspired by this thread, and seeing a dreary rainy morning, I hit the cookbooks, made a shopping list for five different soups, and returned with a box of veg and two chickens.

Oh no, the day turned into a beautiful crisp sunny afternoon! And I’m stuck inside making soup. Oh well, there are worse things.

I’m trying to be as efficient as possible, but I have two stocks to make before starting on the soups, and only one large pressure cooker. So the first part of this afternoon is serial processing.

I first made a mushroom stock, which is mushrooms,herbs and aromatics, zapped in the food processor then pressure cooked for half an hour. Meanwhile I disassembled the chickens, roasted the carcasses, and am now pressure cooking the chicken stock for 40 minutes. In a bit I’ll get up and start cutting stuff for the actual soups. The soups will be parallel processing, since I have five large pots to work with.

The soups are

- Mama Leone’s Chicken Soup (Elephant’s Deli recipe)

- Tomato and Mushroom (Greens cookbook)

- Mushroom Barley (wing it recipe)

- Minestrone (Alice Waters’ Simple Eats cookbook)

- Cream of Mushroom (Cooks Illustrated recipe)

Alas, I’m afeared that I didn’t get enough mushrooms.

HU-blahblah

I just keep a running batch of stock in the fridge - mostly chicken, sometimes a duck, occasionally a few pork or beef bones. Roasted chicken and duck bones, some veggies. When I remember, I go to 99 Ranch and buy a pkg of chicken feet; the gelatin content in them is amazing.

When I cook kale, cabbage, or carrots, I use some stock and then afterwards pour the enriched cooking liquid back into the stock container.

But the best stock I make is with turkey necks. Alas, the poultry processing plants in CA no longer sell them separately. Using them for pet food is more profitable, apparently.

My only source now is the Diestel Turkey Farms sandwich shop and deli in Sebastopol, Sonoma County CA. They sell them frozen, but I haven't been able to get out there due to the lockdown. Now that things are loosening up somewhat, we may be able to drive out and pick some up again!

@John Liu, on my iPad at least, half way through this thread, you turned back into John Liu! It’s a miracle!!

I had just gotten used to my new Houzz-assigned name . . .

The soups are almost all eaten. I made them partly in preparation for my second vaccine shot, in case I felt poorly I wanted to have some comfort food ready. As it turns out the shot was no big deal. But I then had a gallstone attack: and after it was over the soup did come in handy!

Looks good. I want the mushroom, 😜

Use the restaurant trick by cooking any pasta separate, then add to the pot just to heat up before serving...gets mushy/water/logged.

You should look into crabbing. We just bought two ring pots and watching videos. For our beach vacation in a couple weeks...a shame you can't oyster, but maybe clamming? We are planning surf casting, clamming and crabbing. We have our shellfish papers, but need to look into oystering.

Jakkom, Williebird turkey has all things turkey including carcasses. It is near Sebastopol on Hwy 12. They have been open with limited access throughout the shut down.