Photo courtesy of TheCulinaryGeek and Creative Commons licensing.
A few weeks agoI saw something on TV that has been buzzing around in my brain ever since: a master stock. Australia is running this fantastic show, Junior Masterchef Australia – an Iron Chef for kids. These kids are amazing! With one look and one taste, they recreate a dish to perfection – that day I watched them whip up poached pears with spiced cranberry sauce with vanilla mascarpone and a tuille. Eight-year-olds! Making tuille! At that age I was barely beyond burning water.
As if that wasn’t inspiring enough, the show also hosts a master class, to teach another set of ridiculously talented kids how to become a top-grade chef by their bar mitzvah. On the master class that I caught, the visiting chef briefly discussed his master stock: an ever-evolving batch of chicken stock that his restaurant has been nursing for several years. The master stock is similar in concept to a sourdough starter, that develops a complex flavor over time, and similar in execution to a compost heap in that you add to it regularly, using whatever seasonings and vegetables you would normally discard from your everyday cooking. I soon discovered, as I scrambled to the internet to find out what I could, that the master stock has deep roots in Asian cooking and some families have been nurturing theirs for hundreds of years!
Everything I’ve found so far indicates that master stocks have been kept in the Asian style, confining the ingredients to ginger, soy sauce, rice wine, and other spices often found in Asian food. Sources caution to keep to one kind of meat for your stock, and chicken seems to be the most popular. Portions are pulled out for recipes calling for stock, but the magic seems to rest in the whole chickens that are cooked in master stock. This serves a dual purpose of cooking an intensely flavorful chicken and extracting broth-friendly nutrients and flavors from the chicken at the same time. Doesn’t it sound amazing?
I don’t cook Asian food very often, but I started thinking: why couldn’t this be adapted to the kind of cooking I do more often, which is based on local and seasonal offerings with a bit of a European bent? Could a master stock be kept using the herbs I use most often: thyme, oregano, rosemary and sage?
Honestly, I have no idea, but I don’t see why not! So when I get home (six days, folks!) I am embarking on my Master Stock Experiment. I’m going to keep a stock going for about 4-8 weeks, adding to it the odds and ends of vegetables and herbs used throughout the week, plus chicken bones and, once a week, a whole chicken. Can I create a rich, complex, flavorful stock? Or will it end up muddy from too many competing flavors? There’s only one way to find out.
If you’re sufficiently intrigued, simply Google “master stock” and start reading. Stock, also called bone broth, is one of the most incredibly nutritive foods you can eat, and adds incredible flavor to so many dishes. It’s definitely worth having around. Sally Fallon’s excellent article, “Beautiful Broth”, sums it up nicely.
Have you heard of this, or tried it in the past? What do you think will happen? Any advice or suggestions to offer? If you’d like to join in on the experiment, please stay tuned for updates and let me know how you’re doing! Just click on the tag “master-stock” to follow along.
10 comments
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March 7, 2011 at 9:28 pm
Liz @ lizoh.co
This sounds like a great idea! I bet the European flavor profile converts really well, and on the one hand, it seems like having at least a small vision of the flavor profile you’re trying to create will help you decide what happens with food from the random taco or curry rice night. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be interesting if you found out you used different spices more frequently than you expected? I’d love to try along, but we don’t eat nearly enough soup to make it worthwhile. Can’t wait to read more!
March 23, 2011 at 4:46 pm
Bevie
I have done that for about 2 weeks at a time, I had not heard before about people doing it for such extended time spans. I kept mine to poultry with carrot, onion and celery scraps. It was quite good and I expect I will go back to doing it soon, I like to use stock in just about every meal I cook.
March 23, 2011 at 9:45 pm
maggie
I’m learning to use stock more and more, but I would love it if you would name your top 5 uses for it – I’m always looking to learn good tips!
September 14, 2011 at 9:32 am
Carli
If you’re reading this, you’re all set, pardenr!
September 15, 2011 at 12:56 am
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May 27, 2011 at 6:11 pm
Anna
Interesting – I have been making my own stock and freezing it for several years, but had not heard of the concept of keeping and reusing it!
May 27, 2011 at 6:23 pm
Heather C
Just curious… what keeps the stock from spoiling?
June 2, 2011 at 10:50 pm
KIMBER
SO WHAT HAPPENED????
June 7, 2011 at 6:03 am
Master Stock
What keeps master stock from spoiling is cooking with it on a daily basis. The process of boiling and reboiling time after time sterilizes it so that it stays sanitary without the need for refrigeration.
Some folks seem to have the wrong idea about master stock — it’s called “stock” because “master stock” is only an approximate translation of the Chinese “lu shui,” which would be more properly translated as “braising liquid” (“lu” meaning “to steep” and “shui” meaning “water”). You should be using your master stock to braise meats, rather than using it as a soup base.
Starting a stock with a fresh mire poix is a centuries, if not millenia old practice in French cookery. I’m guessing that someone has tried to keep “old soup” at some point during that period, and the results probably were not worth noting. Does thyme, for example, impart bitterness or off flavors after being boiled and reboiled for five years?
On the other hand, there are master stocks that have been handed down from cook to cook for hundreds of years in China because continually building up and refreshing a braising liquid with specific ingredients (soy sauces, Chinese cooking wine, star anise, etc.) produced good results.
I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade, but there are reasons why these different schools of cookery have evolved to include certain practices over a very, very long time. Still, I’d love to hear the results of the experiment. It wouldn’t kill anyone to reconfirm for new generations what masters of past generations already knew.
In the meantime, I have some onions caramelizing, which should provide some complexity to the vegetable soup I’ll be making later.
September 14, 2011 at 6:08 pm
Kindsey
IMHO you’ve got the right anwesr!