Hi Everyone,
You can enrich your meals, reduce salt, and save money by making and using your own homemade stock.
Stock is a flavoured cooking liquid made from meat, bones, seafood, vegetables, herbs and spices cooked in water for a period of time to extract the flavour from the ingredients used. The extraction of iron, collagen and vitamins from bones and marrow not only provides excellent flavour and body to a stock but it is also good for you. Do you notice how we gravitate to soups when we are sick, especially chicken soup, (which many people refer to as liquid penicillin)? There is something about the low, slow, gentle cooking of the ingredients in a large pot of water that unlocks flavours and nutrients that nourish and satisfy.
While there are many uses for stock – soups, stews, sauces, casseroles, stuffing and pilaf-type dishes – there are also different approaches to making stock. Stock can be made from various types of meats, bones, seafood, and vegetables. It is generally made with scraps and bones that have been butchered for other purposes. For example, when I buy whole chickens and cut them up into various pieces – thighs, drumsticks, wings, breast, and backbone – I always reserve a certain amount of the pieces to make stock. When I butterfly a chicken to roast, I save the centre cut of the backbone for stock. If the chicken is cut into large pieces for baking, I’d save the entire back and the tips of the wings to make stock. Or, if I de-bone the breast, the bones are saved for stock making. When I buy bone-in beef, pork or lamb, depending on how I plan to cook them, I would have the butcher remove part or all of the bone along with any connective tissue, skin and cartilage, which I would use to make stock. At the fish market, again, depending on what I to plan make with the fish, once the fillets are removed, I’d have the fish guy bag the middle bone and fish head to make stock. Similarly, when I buy prawns,
