Two for one

This'll be two classes in one post since I slacked a little last week. Okay, a lot.

On Wednesday we continued learning about stocks. We had made a chicken stock earlier in the week, reduced it to a white sauce, made a consume with it, and used the stock as a base in other soups instead of using water so it had more flavor.

Wednesday was about veal stock. Using a veal of beef stock gives your soups or sauces a darker, more flavorful base. The veal stock process takes at least triple the time as a chicken stock does. Here's why:

We first started with the veal bones. In a normal sized stock, like one you would make at home, you'd probably use about 6-8 lbs of veal bones. We tripled the recipe and had about 25 lbs of bones in our massive pots. Massive.

We spread the bones on sheet pans and began roasting them to get a deep, brown color on them. After about 30 minutes, we spread tomato paste on each bone. We didn't have to cover each bone completely with the paste, but we make sure that each bone had some tomato on it. The acidity in the tomato paste is what helps to later break down the bones while they stew in the stock, which will ultimately make for a majorly flavorful stock. The veal bones went back in the oven for about an hour to continue to brown.

Then we started chopping the mirepoix. Remember that fancy word? That's the onions, celery, and carrots that go in as well. Only instead of just throwing them in the pot, we browned them as well so that the mirepoix would help contribute to the dark intense color of the stock as well.

We pulled the bones out and put them in the pot. Then we used the drippings in the pan to coat the mirepoix and popped those in the oven to get a roast. Meanwhile, we cut an onion in half (and a head of garlic) and placed it face down on a hot pan with no oil. Burn, you say? Why, yes. The burnt onion and garlic was added to the stock to, you guessed it, contribute to the darkness that we'd want in a veal stock.

The mirepoix came out and everything was added to a huge stock pot, bones, onion brûlée, spices, and water. Brought that to a boil and then simmered for the rest of the class. Oh, you think we turned that off after 3 hours? Sweetie, the veal stock was on the fire at a very very low simmer for about 21 hours.

We strained the stock in the morning and used the stock three ways:

First, we got started ipon an Espanol sauce. This is a "mother sauce" that can be used as a base for a variety of brown sauces to go with your meats. We made a roux which consists of fat and flour, added stock, and reduced until the flour cooked up and the sauce became nice a thick, "nape," which means that it coats the back of your spoon when you dip it in.

Then, we added more stock to the Espanol and reduced that even more. Reducing a sauce means boiling out the water to leave you with an ultra concentrated thick liquid. This was called a Demi glacé. Like the Espanol, Demi glacé can be used to base a lot of brown sauces.

Last, with whatever stock was left (which was not much), we made a beef and shiitake mushroom soup. Others made a French onion soup which I was planning on making after my shiitake soup, but the stock ran out.

Coming up this week: poultry and lamb! Gotta get it in before the 9 days.

Tip of the day: when making soup and skimming the top, move the pot off to the side so that the fire is on one edge of the pot. You'll start to notice the foam that you want to skim starting to collect on one side of the pot, making it easier for you to skim the foam and fat without taking out too much of your soup.