Stocks! Chicken & Veal

I’ve never made stock before this. I had heard it’s easy. Chop vegies, place in water along with bones and boil the f*ck out of it for however many hours. But really who has however many hours to spare to make stock and surely the results can’t be that much better than the tetra pack stocks? Surely?

Man, was I wrong!

Homemade stock is the best thing ever and it wasn’t even that much of a pain in the ass to make. It’s categorised in the book as “Basics” so that should have given me a hint.

Take these ingredients, all very simple run of the mill, easy to find ingredients – the butcher even gave me the bones for free! (This is probably a common occurrence at butchers, but I get excited about stupid things like that).

Chop like this –

Sweat the vegies -

Stir in flour and tomato paste, then add the bones and fill with water.

Ok, I’m the first to admit that the above photo looks a bit grim, but anyway, from here it’s just boil, boil, boil like crazy for a few hours, skimming the scum from the surface as it rises.

This is how it looked after a few hours of boiling (ie, pretty much the same, my scum-skimming skills are severely limited).

Then I poured it through a sieve lined with muslin as I don’t have a “fine sieve” that the recipe called for, and there you have it. 2 litres of rich, delicious, chicken stock. I could have drunk it like soup, it tasted so good. But I didn’t. I reserved the amount I need for the up coming slow-braised pork belly and divided the rest into 300mL serves and popped into the freezer. I’m a regular Martha Stewart (minus the fraud conviction).

For the veal stock I basically repeated the above process with slightly different ingredients and a lot longer simmering time – 6 hours vs 1 hour for the chicken stock.

You can see the mise en place below.  Note the addition of Madeira and Ruby Port, which kind of made this stock an expensive exercise – the Madeira was $45 and the port $20. Both will be used in later recipes though so I considered it an investment.

I won’t bore you with the rest of the pics for the veal stock making but I will tell you that it was FREAKIN’ EXCELLENT!! Well worth the 8 hours cooking time and the beginning of a long a lustrous relationship between myself and Madeira.

Now that I had the stocks prepared I could look forward to my first attempt at a Main Course – Slow-braised pork belly with langoustine, crushed peas and Madeira sauce!