Dark Veal Stock Cubes Is The Shit!

One of the major elements that distinct good cooking from average cooking  is the use of good quality stock. But does it really worth doing it at home by yourself?

It’s possible to just use powder chicken soup (preferably no MSG added) or better substitutes that can be found easily in the USA and in France but not really in Israel. My friends found a frozen chicken stock in a certain store but it’s very uncommon and hard to find.

This is the brand we used at school when we had no time to make a stock from scratch.

In culinary school it’s one of the first and most important lessons.

There are many types of stocks: light and dark, veal, chicken, fish. Also possible to do lamb, game meat and so on.. The most useful would have to be dark (brun) veal stock and light (blanc) chicken stock. Cooking the chicken stock is straight forward – it’s strained chicken soup preferably made with chicken carcasses, wings, throats.. Always more bones = better flavor.

But the dark veal stock is the real deal. It’s perfect as a base of sauces, cooking meat dishes and grains, even potatoes in the oven..It makes it possible to really “build” the flavor. It’s more work than the light stock, especially in the home kitchen, but it’s worth doing a big batch and freezing in small cubes so that it’s always in reach.

Ask your botcher for veal bones. I got these nice marrow bones in the Carmel Market for 10-20 nis a kilo (2-4 euro). They are freezable so I bought double that amount for the next batch as well. I arranged them in an oven tray and into the oven in maximum heat, turning them around from time to time to reach maximum caramelization.

After the oven. Small trimmings of meat and other bones can be added, or you can save these for the ‘jus’.

Preparing the garnish – tomato, onion and carrot cut to little pieces and an onion with one clove in it. You can make your own ‘bouquet garni’ (herbs tied together). The classic combination is composed of: leek, thyme, bay leaf, parsley stems (also celery stem if you got any), all tied together with a string.

I took out the bones into a big pot (I used pressure cooker which I recommend). Threw the garnish (without the bouquet garni and the half onion) to the used tray with a spoon of tomato paste and caramelize again on the stove.

The bones and the garnish in the pot filled with water until covered, this is when you can throw in little leftovers of onions, carrots, etc. Add some crashed garlic as well. To make the stock even darker it is possible to add some red wine, something like 300 ml of cheap wine. No need to add salt.

For a normal pot, start the cooking on high heat until boiling, add the bouquet garni and garlic and lower to low heat. Cook overnight or something like 8 hours. For a pressure cooker, close the pot and reach maximum pressure with high heat, then lower the heat and continue cooking under pressure for 30 minutes minimum. Preferably 3-4 hours. Put it off the heat until pressure is completely down. It’s possible to keep it closed overnight like that.

At school we learned it’s important to cool the stock very fast using a ‘blast freezer’. Faster you cool it down, longer it keeps. But the blast freezer is a very expensive tool even for the professional kitchen, so there’s nothing to worry about cooling it to room temperature and only then moving the strained stock to the fridge.

You can strain the stock before or after cooling down. The straining should be in two phases: first take out the big pieces like the bones and the half an onion, then use a thin strainer to pass all the stock and get a clear liquid. Don’t squeeze the garnish over the strainer to get more liquid out otherwise it will get cloudy. Keep the bones for the second round! You can throw away the garnish and the marrow or eat it with some salt if you like.

If you leave it in the cooker overnight, open it in the morning, this is what you get.

If you first sort out the bones and strain carefully, this is what you get after cooling down.

The layer of fat has to be removed, most easily when it’s cold and coagulated like in the pictures but also possible while still warm. When it’s coagulated just remove all the fat with a spoon.

Now you have stock that can be used immediately or kept for later. Make another batch using the same bones to get the maximum flavor out of your bones, no need to caramelize it once again but do use more vegetables (big pieces or even whole is okay when not caramelizing). When the second batch is ready and strained you can get rid of the bones and reduce it (can also be mixed with the first batch and reduce together). After boiling, keep in low heat in a big pot until it gets to half or even less the amount it started. Cool down, use whatever you need and keep the rest in the freezer for next time.

You can pour the stock to ice-cubes trays (silicon trays would be easier to separate once it freezes) and the rest to a plastic container, mark the content. Release the cubes once they are completely frozen and keep in a box in the freezer.

Now every time you cook anything worth using stock just take 2-3 cubes out of the freezer and your good to go! I recommend again to read my last post about stocks in the school’s kitchen as it is very detailed. A lot of work is put into these stocks so you can imagine it is not done for nothing, the work is well paid off when you use a really good stock in your dish.