The Cook's Corner Blog: beef stock

Showing posts with label beef stock. Show all posts

Wednesday

French Onion Soup Weather

January is French onion soup weather.

I had some homemade beef stock on hand and lots of onions, and it was winter... all perfect conditions for concocting a batch of my famous onion soup. (I don't wish to brag but in my restaurants, we served what everybody called the best onion soup in the world.)

Onion soup is the easiest dish in the world, but unless you start with first-class ingredients, you may as well buy it in a can.

In fact, quality ingredients are so important that since there is no decent French bread available in my village, I had to start by making a batch of baguette -- no kidding.

Here's the recipe:

Lots of cooking onions - 1 large onion per portion
Olive oil and/or butter
Home-made brown beef stock (recipe here)
Home-made chicken stock, degreased
Brandy
Bay leaves
Salt and pepper
French baguette bread (recipe here)
Clarified butter (recipe here)
Swiss-type cheese like Emmenthaler or Jarlsberg
Real Parmesan cheese

Slice the baguette into 3/4-inch (2 cm) slices and dry them thoroughly in a 200-degree (100 C) oven. (You don't want to toast it, just dry it.)

Mix the beef and chicken stocks in a separate saucepan and heat them up; keep warm.

Peel onions, slice them in two lengthwise (from root to tip, to get two identical halves), and slice each half thinly along the length.

Heat some butter or a mixture of butter and oil in a large frying pan, add onions and stir and stir until they start to turn golden brown; then add a teaspoonful of sugar and continue frying and stirring until the onions are a deep golden brown. They must not burn. If you're making a lot of soup, do this in batches and transfer each batch to a bowl while you fry the next batch.

Combine all the onions back into the frying pan, sprinkle with a bit of flour and stir around until the flour has browned. Do this on medium heat so the flour doesn't burn. You just need a little bit of flour, just a tablespoon or two.

Pour a splash of brandy and a couple of ladles of stock over the onions, and stir to dissolve the flour and all the brown residue at the bottom of the pan. Scrape this off well with a wooden spoon, then transfer the whole thing to your soup pot.

Add more beef and chicken stock -- there must be more liquid than onions, about 1/3 more.

Add a bit of salt and pepper, a few bay leaves, and simmer the soup on low heat for half an hour, just to meld the flavours, really, because the onions are already cooked.

The oven should be preheated to 450 F (225 C) and the rack should be in the centre position.

Heat some clarified butter in a small pan and fry the bread slices on both sides until they are just a nice golden colour.

Taste the soup and adjust the seasoning if necessary.

Ladle the soup into individual ovenproof tureens (or one large one, as in the photo), cover the surface with slices of fried bread, sprinkle grated Swiss-type cheese (not too much, please! This isn't pizza.), and sprinkle a spoonful of real Parmesan if you have any.

Place the whole thing on a cookie sheet or pizza pan or whatever (to catch spills and make it safer to handle when it's ready).

Bake for about 10 minutes, or until the top is like the photo -- brown and bubbly and smelling like nothing else on earth.

Bon appétit!

TIPS & TRICKS

VARIATION: This onion soup is very good all by itself, or with a light sprinkling of Parmesan cheese.

The reason I recommend slicing the onions as described above is that this way you get onion pieces in the soup. If you slice them across instead, the onions tend to dissolve and disappear.

The size of the pan, the amount of heat, the amount of fat and the amount of onions in each batch must be such that the onions start frying right away, without rendering their water.

There's no point in using a crock pot for this; the cooking time is too short.

Only white French-style bread has the right body and flavour for this soup. This is NOT the place for your healthy multigrain sourdough bread -- I know, because I've tried it.

I made the bread too!

Monday

Readers' Questions 4

Q. My beef stock isn't brown. Why? (From South Yarra, Australia)

A. Did you brown the meat and vegetables enough, as specified in the recipe? Afterwards, did you scrape the brown bits at the bottom of the pan when you added the water? It's that caramelization that provides the brown color and the deep flavor to the stock.

Q. Do I stir the boeuf bourguignon in the stock pot? (From San Francisco, California, USA)

A. In a word, No.

Q. Why don't you add salt to beef stock? (From Davenport, Iowa, USA)

A. Because the stock reduces so much during cooking that it would end up too salty, or ruin the dish that you're adding it to.

This is a good place to apply the saying, "When in doubt, don't!"

Sunday

Saturday

Questions From Our Readers

Q. How much water must you add on a cube of beef stock? (From Bahrain)

A. Have you tried reading the label? I checked at the store and every single brand of beef, chicken and vegetable bouillon had very precise directions. I happen to have a package of Knorr chicken cubes at home. Each cube weighs 12 grams and the directions read: “HOW TO PREPARE: Dissolve 1 cube in 2 cups (550 mL) boiling water.” There’s also a phone number and a website URL. So, if your cubes weigh 12 grams, you should dissolve them in 2 cups or 550 mL of boiling water.

Q. What is the best cut of beef for beef bourguignon? (From New York, NY, USA)

A. The chuck, from the shoulder, has the ideal texture and marbling. I sometimes use cross-rib because my butcher often has it at a discount; it has a texture that I like but you have to watch it because it can dry out. Avoid any cut that is too lean. You need some fat and gristle for the long, slow cooking.

Brown Beef Stock in Six Simple Steps

DID YOU NOTICE that all the beef bourguignon recipes call for beef stock? You just can't get that rich beef flavour without it.

I know, you can now buy both chicken and beef stock in that awful Tetrapak packaging (do you know it's not recyclable?), and it looks real enough. I mean, Rachael Ray uses it, and so do all the celebrity chefs on the food channel, so it must be good, right?

It's okay, but in their own restaurant kitchens, real-life chefs have a helper who makes all the stocks, and there's a reason for it: it's much, much better than anything you can buy. Not to mention a lot cheaper, because it's made with scraps, leftovers and vegetables that are no longer fresh enough to serve, like limp carrots. In my own restaurants, we always made all our own stocks.

AFTER my cross-rib roast shopping spree (the one that propulsed this whole blog), once I had the freezer stocked with 20 lbs of ground meat and 8 nice little pot roasts for four, I had all those lovely trimmings of fat, gristle and meat, so of course I made brown beef stock, (also known as beef broth, bouillon and consommé).

You will see from these pictures how easy it is!

Step 1. You need beef scraps, fat, gristle, (bones if you have any), a couple of unpeeled onions, halved, a couple of stalks of celery, halved, two cloves of garlic, unpeeled.

Had I had some carrots around I would have added some (unpeeled, cut in two lengthwise and in two crosswise).

Are you thinking, "Oh my, so much fat!"? Don't worry. It's only there for the flavour. Once the stock is done, all of it will be removed.

I love using my big non-stick turkey roasting pan for this, because it's big enough to have everything in one layer, which is essential for proper browning.

Step 2. Place the roasting pan in a 450-degree (220°C) oven and roast until brown on top – check frequently.

Stir and return to oven until everything is a deep brown but not burned.

Push the ingredients aside: this is what the bottom should look like. This means that all the juices have caramelized enough.

Take the pan out of the oven and turn the temperature down to 325 degrees (160°C).

Step 3. Now, pour in COLD water gradually, scraping the brown bits until they're completely incorporated. Pour more cold water until everything is covered, and a bit more.

Add a sprinkling of thyme, two bay leaves, three peppercorns and two allspice berries (the latter is a secret I learned in Mexico).

Step 4. Bring to a boil on top of the stove, then place in 325-degree (160°C) for at least two hours. You could use the extra oven shelf for making a stew, roasting a chicken or baking potatoes.

ALTERNATIVELY, you could transfer all the ingredients to a stock pot, scrape the brown bits from the bottom with water, pour those juices into the stock pot, add water to the stock pot to cover, and simmer the stock on top of the stove for at least two hours.

Step 5. The stock is done. Note how much it has reduced: this is normal. Strain it through a fine sieve. Transfer it to a clean container and refrigerate overnight.

Step 6. See how the fat has congealed? Remove it with a slotted spoon. (If this were chicken fat, you could save it for making cookies.)

You now have a completely fat-free, slightly jellified brown beef bouillon. (With bones it would have jellified much more.)

By the way, it's important to remove the fat; otherwise, the stock will not keep well.

If you want a really clear stock, bring it to the boil and strain it again through a coffee filter or several layers of cheesecloth.

At this point you have a beautiful, dark, fairly clear, but quite tasteless product.

Heat up a small quantity, add salt, and taste it. If it tastes like you could use it as is – with a deep, beefy flavour – then it needs no further input.

If it's tasteless even after adding enough salt, you may have added too much water. Put it back on the stove and reduce it somewhat.

If what you want is a glace de viande, put it back on the stove and reduce it in half. (At that point you could freeze it in ice cube trays, then transfer it to a zippered bag, from where you could extract a cube or two when you want to use the real thing instead of a bouillon cube.)

Whatever you do, do not season it before storing it. If you're used to bouillon cubes, you'll find yourself adding more salt to your dishes than usual, but when you don't want the extra salt, it won't be there.

Don't you think it was worth the fifteen minutes or so of active preparation time? (The rest happened all by itself.)

So, apart from Beef Bourguignon, what would you make with your own home-made stock?