[Sca-cooks] RE: Sca-cooks digest, Vol 1 #1431 - 6 msgs

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Margali, almost guilty of registered trademark infringement, writes:

>Sorry, but in certain things I am gideously and tacitly adamant like one
>other person on the list [without looking like fred flintstone] in that
>stocks are to be made with good ingredients otherwise they are not worth the
>bother. Any off flavors will just get concentrated like the yummy flavors
>that one is after. Anybody that knows me will also realize that there are
>damn few commercial meat glazes or prepared stocks I will bother with for
>similar reasons. If I want that much of a salt flavor in my food, I can
>certainly oversalt it myself!

I didn't do nuthin! Oi'm a good boy, Oi yam!

I agree with most of the above (in general, if you wouldn't eat it,
it doesn't belong in your stock, with notable exceptions like bones)
, although while I have been known to include an onion skin, I have a
peculiar horror of stock made from roasted poultry bones. I'm not
talking about brown poultry jus or stock, I just mean stock made from
leftover turkey or chicken bones. It always seems to have this
bitter, _bone_ aftertaste, rather than the gelatin/meat/aromatic
tones of a good stock. They also seem to cloud up very easily.

I made a rather nice pork-and-chicken stock yesterday, because my
lady wife had asked for pork stock for seaweed soup (and pork stock
being the stock of choice among many Southern Chinese), and I could
only find about a pound of pork bones in the freezer, so I augmented
them with some chicken wing tips and thigh bones. In lieu of mirepoix
I added two large slices of ginger and the white bottoms of two
scallions.

Then, of course, it turned out that we had used up our supply of
laver (some might claim this was a good thing), so had to make do
with minced pork, cilantro, more scallion, and egg flowers...

Adamantius