The Missing Ingredient by Jenny Linford

Author:Jenny Linford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846148989
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-01-05T16:00:00+00:00

TAKING STOCK

The making of stock is both straightforward and satisfying, a gentle process of extracting taste and goodness from ingredients such as bones, vegetables and herbs through cooking them in water. Over that period, the water is enriched and transformed, taking on the flavours of what has been simmered in it. As anyone who has thriftily made stock from a roast chicken carcass knows, home-made stock is a flavourful base for soups or risottos. The importance of stock in the restaurant kitchen is manifest in the fact that cookbooks by chefs invariably contain recipes for it. Despite its fundamental simplicity, care and attention play their part. If clarity of a stock made from bones is sought, then very gentle simmering over a low heat as opposed to impatient boiling is required, otherwise the results will be cloudy. In order to boost flavour, some stock recipes require a preliminary frying or roasting of ingredients – whether chicken wings or chopped vegetables – to brown them. This has the practical effect of creating the Maillard reaction and so imparting an extra, umami-rich savouriness to the final stock.

The time taken to make stock varies hugely, depending on the ingredients used. Chicken stock usually entails at least an hour, and at least 2 hours when a traditional, tough old boiling fowl is being used. Thin, fragile fish bones, in contrast, require a far shorter time, classically simmered for just 15–20 minutes. In Japanese cuisine, ichiban dashi, the core stock, is made in the same time frame from dried kelp (kombu) and dried bonito flakes (katsuobushi), with great precision required over the water temperature and contact time for each ingredient. Recipes vary in details, but the overall order of the recipe remains the same. First the kelp is used to flavour the water, through either steeping or simmering. The seaweed is then removed, dried bonito flakes are added and the water is brought to full boil. Contact times at this stage are critical. ‘If bonito flakes boil more than a few seconds, the stock becomes too strong, a bit bitter, and is not suitable for use in clear soups,’ warns the Japanese food writer Shizuo Tsuji. Dashi acquires flavour quickly because, as Japanese chef Yoshihiro Murata has observed, time has been put in at an earlier stage: drying both the kelp and the bonito intensifies their flavour.

In contrast, the basic broth used for ramen is slow-cooked, made from meaty pork bones and chicken, boiled for several hours or longer. As the cult 1985 film Tampopo showed, getting the broth correct is vital to successful ramen. Rather than the clarity often sought in stock, properly made ramen broth is opaque, pale in colour, possessing a specific fatty texture much valued by aficionados. The heat and the time taken in cooking it in effect break down the bones, creating not only gelatine but emulsifying extracted solids, such as fat and marrow, into the broth to create its cloudy appearance and distinctive mouth-feel. In Western cuisine, a similar

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