mix, mix…stir, stir

I think I have finally conquered stock. Partly because I have realized that the biggest challenge for me is figuring out how to fit it into life. Though I have made stock now and again throughout my cooking life, I never managed to adopt it as a way of life. Reaching for a can of stock in the store is always accompanied by a tiny bit of guilt with hearing a faint chorus of cooking show host and chef voices ring through my ears saying, “you should make your own stock.” Now I think I will finally be making my own stock on a regular basis.

photo by Carol Peterman

The primary reason? I just made three batches in the last few weeks and managed to work out some little issues that make all the difference. The inspiration behind my stock-fest is an online culinary program I am participating in at Rouxbe.com. Rouxbe is a great cooking site with the best quality instructional video I have come across and this summer they started a self-paced online cooking school complete with lessons, homework and tests. Sign me up! The site has some free content, but the cooking school and bulk of the content requires purchasing a subscription to access. Though I received my initial subscription as a gift by being a Metrokitchen.com customer, I will resubscribe next year.

The revelations I have had come from seeing the stock making videos and finally understanding what “simmer” looks like. Seeing a great example of what clear stock looks like and realizing I achieved that; I can see a carrot at the bottom of my bowl! Having confidence that I am doing this right makes me want to make stock. Hooray for my new found confidence, but there is still the issue of working out a few irritating kinks. They may seem trivial, but I tell you it’s the little stuff that can make the difference between something becoming second nature and it just feeling like too much darn work.

The first batch of stock I made I carefully scooped out the bones and vegetables into a bowl and moved on to straining and cooling the stock. I now have this large bowl of very hot drippy wet stuff I need to throw away. I don’t want to just toss it in the outside garbage can loose, I can’t put it in a paper garbage bag, so I scooped it into a plastic bag that I then nearly burned myself carrying outside and was worried the contents would melt the bag before I got to the garbage can. That would be a fun mess to clean up! Not to mention that I now have a giant messy bowl to wash. The better way – empty milk cartons!

photo by Carol Peterman

Next issue of contention: cooling the hot stock. From a food safety aspect the only way to go is an ice bath. I now have the stock divided between two more large bowls that I then set in two more even larger bowls containing the ice bath. That’s four more large bowls to wash! It’s late and I am tired and not liking all this effort. Revelation: Plastic dish pans for the ice bath. They are light weight and really just need a rinse and quick dry before putting them away. I am now down to only dirtying two large bowls and a stock pot. This is progress! The ice bath is nice because it is fast and the stock can be portioned for freezing and put away within about 30 minutes. The tip for a good ice bath: buy a bag of ice at the store so there is enough ice on hand to make an effective ice bath.

photo by Carol Peterman

After reading Harold McGee’s latest article in the New York Times on ice and cold things I learned how to make the most effective ice bath – add salt. It is colder and will chill faster. I had two ice baths going anyhow, why not have a little contest? The bath on the left was just ice and water the one on the right I added about a third cup of kosher salt. Sure enough, the stock in the salted water cooled to 40 degrees F in just about 30 minutes and the other one was still at 47 degrees F. After 30 minutes, the water temperature of the salted bath was 28 degrees F and the non-salted water had climbed to 37 degrees F. I didn’t get quite as dramatically different cooling results that McGee did in his tests, but my two samples weren’t so perfectly controlled as I suspect his were. I don’t know how long it would have taken the non-salted stock to cool completely because in the interest of getting to bed I moved the lagging bowl of stock into the salted water bath to wrap up the project as quickly as possible.

With only three practice batches of stock I managed to work out a few little process issues that make it just enough easier that stock-making is on the verge of becoming second nature to me. I now have the timing down – as in start early in the day so I am not up to all hours, know the volume of ingredients off the top of my head, and don’t end up dirtying every bowl in my kitchen during the process. I don’t stir and have learned to control the heat so I never let the stock boil, just simmer. Best of all I have a freezer full of great tasting stock. The true test will come when my freezer supply runs low. Will I pull out my stash of bones from the freezer and get cooking, or head to the store and once again hear that little chorus of voices?

I bet you already own many cookbooks with instructions on making stock, plus you have the Internet at your fingertips as a further resource. I hope you will have your own little stock-fest and figure out how to work this core element of cooking into your life.

Big, thick, chewy, peanutbuttery, chocolaty chunky cookies is what I’m talking about. How could that be anything but good?

photo by David Peterman

The Tuesdays with Dorie group had me making cookies this week. This recipe, which you can find in Dorie Greenspan’s book Baking: From My Home to Yours, brings the three classics of chocolate, oatmeal, and peanut butter, together in a delicious and harmonious way without letting one single ingredient steal the spotlight. I really expected these to be peanut butter cookies with stuff in them, but far from it. It could be that the addition of cinnamon and nutmeg ends up keeping all the star ingredients in check.

Two process discoveries I made: I preferred them cooked a bit crispier than I normally bake cookies, and the dough was better after aging in the fridge for two days. Dorie recommends baking at 350 degrees F and because I usually bake with the convection fan on, which makes the oven a bit hotter, I dropped the temp to 325 degrees F. The second batch I baked at 350 with convection and let them go until I saw the tops just starting to brown, and though they were a bit crispy they weren’t dry. The crunchier bite worked becasue of the peanut butter component in the dough.

photo by David Peterman

The idea of cookie dough benefiting from a 24 to 72 hour rest in the fridge was first brought to my attention by a New York Times article on the perfect chocolate chip cookie. I can’t honestly say that I noticed as dramatic a difference as the article set me up to expect when I tried their recipe and baked batches off at different time intervals, but with this dough I did prefer the extended resting period becasue the oats softened and became more integrated into the baked cookie. The hearty thick cut oats I used were a bit toothsome the first day I baked them. I didn’t intend to test the resting period with this dough, it just worked out that I didn’t have the time to bake the whole batch at once and ended up with a happy discovery.

The NYT article did have a permanent impact on my cookie baking, but because of salt not resting time. A light sprinkle of salt on the cookies before baking delivers a perfect delicately salty counterpoint to the sweetness of the dough and chocolate. Though my choice is flake salt, specifically Murray River Flake Salt over sea salt.

It was fun to bake cookies this week. Thanks to Stefany of Proceed with Caution for the great selection.