Beef Stock – Diversifying Your Tasty Portfolio

Did you lose all of your stock when the economy went down the toilet? No Problem! Just make more!

Beef stock can be used in making almost everything. It is commonly used as a base for soups and sauces, but I throw it in to tons of stuff. It is so full of flavor that it usually takes the place of salt and pepper in a lot of my dishes.

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Ingredients

Beef Bones – 6 lbs

Carrots – 5 large

Onions – 2 large

Potatoes – 3 large

Celery – 3 stalks with leaves

Garlic – 1/2 head

Whole Peppercorns – 1/4 cup

The first thing I did was set my oven to 450 degrees. While it was warming up I cut up all of the veggies into 1 sq/in chunks and laid them onto two separate baking sheets (I have small baking sheets. If you can fit everything on one, go ahead).

Next I got out my 6 lbs of beef bones. I live in Koreatown, and across the street from a large Korean grocery store sells a lot of things I cant find at my local Ralphs, such as bags of bones. When I was walking to the store thinking about 6 lbs of bones, I imagined something much more impressive then what I ended up with. 6 lbs of bones, it turns out, is really only two baggies of what appears to be the knee joints.

I spread the bones out on top of the veggies.

By this time my oven was up to 450 and ready for use. Uncovered, I placed the baking sheets in the oven next to one another. They will be in there for 30 minutes, or until the bones are a nice golden brown.

With that stuff baking away, I went ahead and cut up all of that garlic into rough 1/4 inch pieces and threw it into my stock pot with a 1/4 cup of whole peppercorns.

After about 30 minutes, the veggies and bones were ready to come out of the oven. What had been this:

was magically transformed, by the powers of heat and time, into this:

At this point I took everything from the baking sheets and put it into my stock pot.

And then I filled the pot up with water until everything was covered in water.

The water was brought to a boil, and then down to a simmer. Then I covered the stock pot, turned out the lights, and left the room.

It was like making a baby, only at the end of the process you get to eat what you made, instead of having to pay for braces and college (unless your name is Jonathan Swift, because then you will eat what you made anyway).  You put all of these ingredients together, and you don’t know exactly how it will turn out in the end, but you know you’ll love it no matter what.

After 5 hours your apartment should smell sufficiently of deliciousness, and you will have eaten like 2-3 times since you started due to the hunger-inspiring fumes leaking from the kitchen.

I took my strainer and began scooping out all of the veggies and bones.

This is a lengthy and annoying step. After 5 hours soaking in boiling water, everything has turned into a stringy, mushy, structureless mess. But Sweet Christ, how it does smell good.

Yum. Just writing this post and looking at those pictures has left me dwelling more and more on the ever growing void in my gut where food should be. Let’s finish this up.

After straining everything out of your stock pot, it’s time to clear a large space in your refrigerator. Place your stock pot in here.

Then close the door and leave it over night.

In the morning, open the door and discover the great layer of solidified fat that now covers the surface of the stock.

Break this apart and remove it. I kept a lot of it in tupperware to cook with (it’s fantastic for greasing your pan). There will be a lot of little pieces floating around in the stock, so I ran my strainer through there a couple more times.

I split my stock between tupperware and ice cub trays. Whenever I’m cooking something that I think could use some stock, I just pop out a couple of cubes and throw them in the pan. Rice tastes really good with a couple of stock cubes.

It will last for months in tupperware in the freezer…I think.

Drew

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