OK, folks, we talked about stock and figured some of you might want to see how it works. The holidays are an excellent time for us to complete this project as we have some time and are often in the kitchen, anyway.
For the super quick primer, broth and stock are quite similar. Both can be made from meat and veggies, but stock is always made from bones (like a turkey carcass in our case) and also is cooked for more time to make it slightly more concentrated. You can make all sorts of stocks & broth, such as turkey, chicken, beef, moose, caribou and even just plain vegetable.
If you haven’t ventured into stock making, it’s an excellent way to use up produce, especially veggie scraps if you have them. It’s also a way to get great value from leftover bones and meat. Often, our home made stock is significantly better than the store bought stuff. It’s also dirt cheap to make, basically leftover meat/bones, vegetables and water. Considering a quart of store bought stock goes for $5-$7+ these days, making up a dozen+ quarts of home made stock is a serious value add we can get from our gardens.
If you recall, we froze the bulk of our celery leaves for this process. We also have started peeling our carrots for preservation, putting them up for the winter using our blanch & freeze technique, which gives us a ton of carrot scraps to use in our stocks. Carrots and celery are excellent “bulk” ingredients to add to your stocks and using these scraps is practically “free” for us. Add in some onions, leeks, garlic, some dried/fresh herbs, a bit of salt, some peppercorns and you are in business.
We don’t follow a specific ratio of vegetables/meat to water and you have a lot of flexibility here. In our opinion, most online recipes for stock go a little anemic on the vegetable to water ratio. The bottom line is that the more meat & vegetables you have to water, the more flavor you’re going to end up with.
For a quality stock, you’re typically cooking (simmering) it down for many, many hours. We often go for 6-12 hours. If you’re short on time, less time works too, but you’ll end up with a thinner and slightly less flavorful broth.
Now, here’s the “bad” part. If you want to preserve all that stock or broth goodness for the long haul, you’re looking at having to use a pressure canner. To render stock safe, especially meat stock, you have to apply 10 PSI for at least 25 minutes for your average quart jar. If this scares you, you can also use that stock fresh, typically you’ve got about 14 days to scarf it up. But, if you can render your stock safe, you’ve got years of storage time ahead of you.
If you’re not familiar with how to use stock, outside of any given recipe that calls for it, it’s a very versatile thing. You can often substitute it for water and it will give your dish an amazing, deep flavor that can’t be achieved otherwise. It’s very popular to use in soups and stews, of course, but there’s a ton of other ways to use it as well.
Some people are “purists” and try to make sure the stock matches whatever they’re cooking. Chicken stock with chicken, beef stock with beef, etc. However, there’s no unwritten rule that says you can’t mix and match. You’d be hard pressed to find many recipes out there that call for “moose stock,” but we’ll tell you, it’s delicious in everything we’ve tried it in.
Anyway, there’s probably more that we could say, but we figured it might be helpful to illustrate our thoughts and process a bit. We’re excited to get this stock into our cooking, our initial tastings indicate we have an excellent turkey and vegetable stock on our hands!
