[Sca-cooks] A curiosity

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Mar 22, 2006, at 12:44 PM, King's Taste Productions wrote:

> Anybody got a reason you wouldn't want to chill it overnight to remove
> the
> fat?
>
>
> Let the stock reduce down to where you want it, then pour it into and
> ice
> cube tray and freeze it. Next AM, seperate the cubes and put them in a
> freezer baggie, to dump into whatever you want to enrich.
>
> Phlip
>
> --------
>
> Aha! Yes, I do.  I just taught a one-day Culinary Basics class for
> Viking on Saturday.  The notes (which all come from the corporate chef
> team) said that if you leave the fat on top of the pot, it prevents  
> the
> stock from 'breathing'.  I suspect I reduces the amount of steam that
> can escape, which would not allow for deeper flavors to develop.  Once
> it is strained, you are reducing, but perhaps not allowing for the
> original ingredients to do their thing.
>
> Christianna

This is pretty much where I come down on the "to skim or not to skim"  
controversy, as well.

My experience has been that if you skim the fat off, you allow more  
impurities to rise to the surface and solidify so that they, in turn,  
can be more easily skimmed. I think that the layer of liquid fat  
does, as Christianna suggests, seal in some of the steam and keep the  
liquid from reducing and developing flavor (and in the case of a  
brown beef stock, there's probably some kind of oxidation going on,  
too).

When you start the stock going (usually around the time it has come  
to its first boil and you're thinking about adding aromatics, if you  
do it that way), you may note that there's some fat on the top, then  
some funky dirty-brown albumen gunk _under_ the layer of fat. If you  
skim the fat off, this rises to the top and becomes semi-solid and is  
easier to remove, IMO, than if you don't skim and try to remove  
everything at once. YMMV.

Another consideration is that if you leave several gallons (and to my  
mind there's little point in making less than a couple of gallons of  
brown stock at a shot) of unskimmed stock to cool, it cools off  
somewhat more slowly, I suspect, when you have that lovely layer of  
fat sealing in the heat. Which, in turn, can result in stock that is  
sour after a couple of days in the fridge.

None of this is to paint a picture of me cackling madly as I skim the  
stock 87 times: I bring it to a good boil in the beginning of the  
process, skim (I use the bowl of a ladle, starting in the center of  
the pot, moving it in a swirling motion to push all the scunge -- is  
this a real word, BTW? I've been using it for years, and it's  
probably a portmanteau of scum and grunge -- to the edges where they  
can be more easily be captured with the ladle). Then I place the pot  
off-center of the burner, so the hot spot, IOW the convection  
chimney, as it were, the place where the bubbles rise from, is near  
the edge of the pot, so convection pushes that raft of scunge over to  
one side and sort of consolidates it. I then don't generally skim  
again until it's time to take the pot off the heat and decant the stock.

Re egg white, what she, they, and everybody else, said, except I  
rarely find it necessary, using the method described above, to use  
them unless I am making consomme, which is infrequent these days...

As for the question of herbs and other aromatics, I agree that they  
can limit the range of use, as some of the flavor combinations can  
get a little strange. That said, if you're making a classic fond brun  
out of roasted beef or veal bones (by which I mean roasted,  
caramelized bones, not the bones from roast meat), you're pretty much  
placing yourself in the hands of Careme and Escoffier, et al, anyway,  
and a little thyme isn't going to kill anybody, and it is probably  
fairly appropriate with whatever you're likely to do with the fond  
brun anyway. I mean, why go to the trouble to make the stuff if you  
then decide to make, say, hot-and-sour soup after you've already more  
or less plighted your troth to something like French onion soup or  
demiglaze sauce?

But I should talk, the last stock I made (last night) was made from  
two whole soup chickens (with head and feet) and about two pounds of  
frog's legs...

Adamantius



"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them  
eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04