Thoughts on stock and stock-making from up-and-coming Toronto chefs. From an article by Ivy Knight (http://www.canadapfl.com/figher_bios/vic_payback.html) on eGullet.ORG (http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=100936). Ingredients See link for entire article & comments

Instructions
From http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=100936

Shalmanese: My latest discovery is that fat actually makes for a far superior stock to bones. For my brown stocks, all the trimmed skins and pockets of fat I carve off from roasts and chickens, I save in a ziplock and when I have enough, I render it all out until it's crisp. I then add any bones I have to the pot and keep the rendered fat at a steady 300F or so until the bones are well browned. I find this avoids the pesky problem with oven roasting where some bones become overbrowned since you're roasting at 500F. Finally, I add carrots and onions only to the hot oil and cook them until they become sweet and fragrant. Add in the water and cook it down for about 2 hours and it's done. Because the bones are so cooked already by the fat, the extraction can work much faster producing a cleaner, lighter stock. The stock is very sweet and rich without that overly browned soggy note common in brown stocks.

For white stocks, I get around the problem of vegetables overcooking by doing a double stock procedure. I first simmer just the bones with dried herbs such as bayleaves, strain, remove the fat and then set it back on the burner. While the stock is reducing, I add in the vegetables and let it cook for 30 minutes more with far more vegetables and fresh herbs than is usually called for. This has a number of advantages:

1. You don't overcook the vegetables so you keep the fresh light flavour
2. Your stock has reduced by about 1/2 during this time leading to a more flavourful stock
3. You essentially have mirepoix cooked in chicken stock which you can then use for other dishes rather than being wasted.
4. You can save the fat from the first cooking which won't have funky vegetable flavours.
5. You can create a few different variations on the base stock for different dishes, ie: throw some mushrooms in one reduction, some parsnips in another etc.

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Nathan Isberg (Executive Chef at Coca and Czehoski on Queen Street West in Toronto) brings this up to a boil slowly, then lets it boil rapidly for about five minutes, skimming constantly. Then he puts the stockpot in a 300-degree oven overnight. Not a lot of what Nathan does while making stocks is new except for this last bit. I've never heard of cooking a stock in the oven. He believes that too much agitation goes on when a pot simmers on top of the stove all night. Interesting. The next day the bones are taken out of the pot and the stock is strained through a fine chinois. Then the stock gets refrigerated. The fat congeals; a cook removes it. And there you have it. Perfect stock to be used any number of ways -- many of which will require that the stock be reduced.

maggiethecat: So when I read about Nathan Isberg's stockpot-in-the-oven method I got with the program yesterday night. I brought the stockpot to a boil around midnight, stuck it in the oven, finished watching a movie and headed to bed. Ten hours later -- I do not arise betimes on Sunday -- I pulled a gorgeous few golden gallons of chicken stock from the oven -- it was cooking at the gentlest of simmers, the Platonic Ideal of simmers. The result was a couple of gallons of tasty, clear, golden stock. I just love not watching a pot.

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"When you reduce stock to the level most chefs do it gives too gelatinous a mouthfeel." Nathan continues his lesson. "Straight reducing makes it more intense, not more complex. When trying to make a stock richer, take 250 millilitres and reduce, then add another 250 millilitres, deglazing the pan over and over with stock. Out of sixteen litres of stock you'll get the same amount of flavour but way less waste."

Nathan also thickens his stocks with cornstarch too. He reduces to where he feels the flavor is right, then finishes with a small amount of slurry.

Shalmanese: The amount of water removed from a stock is a function of the amount of heat you put into it while the degree of reduction is a function of the total amount of water which means larger amounts of stock need to be cooked longer to achieve the same amount of reduction. Say you have a 10 gallon vat of stock which needs 2 hours for a 2x reduction. If you cook it the conventional way, the entire vat of stock will be cooked for 2 hours longer, leading to flavour breakdown and a flat feeling. If you cook it adding 1 gallon at a time every 12 minutes, then the first gallon will be cooked for 120 minutes, the second gallon will be cooked for 108 minutes and the last gallon added will be cooked for only 12 minutes. That way, a large part of the stock is not overcooked.

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