Culinary school: Making stocks

Day 5 Monday, June 14, 2010

All around the room you could hear Whack!

My classmate Gillian* and I were cutting chicken carcasses into smaller pieces to make stock. We took the skin and fat off the bones.

Whack! I hit a chicken bone with the base end of my knife, but the bone didn’t break all the way through. I hacked some more.

We covered the chicken bones with water in a stockpot and brought them to a boil. Then we discarded the water and filled the pot again. We dropped in a bouquet garni of thyme, parsley stems, peppercorns and a bay leaf, letting the herbs and spices fall loosely in the water. We would be straining the stock later, so putting the bouquet garni in a sachet was an extra step we didn’t have time for.

We brought the stock to a simmer and let it sit on the stove for about two hours, skimming off oil as we started other stocks.

“It’s not very complicated,” Chef X had said.

But he said sternly, “Never add salt to your stock.”

The flavor would come from the bones and the mirepoix of cut vegetables. Mirepoix means “put in place.” The size of vegetables and what type vary in a recipe depending on how long you cook them.

Our fish stock was simmering away on the other burner. I had sweated leeks, onions, celery and mushroom trimmings in the pot before adding the halibut bones. When the flesh had turned white, I deglazed with white wine. I let some of the alcohol bubble off. I covered the bones with water, added the herbs, spices and garlic and let it simmer for about 20 minutes.

When Gillian and I brought our fish stock for Chef X’s inspection, he said, “Very Good!” and wrote “Perfect” next our names.

My whole body smiled.

About two hours later, he wrote, “Very good,” after he saw our chicken stock.

But he looked at our vegetable stock and said, “It’s OK. It look gray.”

The stock was supposed to look more yellow than it did.

He explained that maybe when we sweated the vegetables, we had too many chopped green leeks in our stock, or maybe we cooked the butter too long before we sweated the vegetables.

I came home, wired. The more we cooked in class, the more I felt I could handle culinary school.

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*Name has been changed.

Other posts:
Why I'm going to culinary school
Panic before my first class at culinary school
Day 1: Who said cutting vegetables is easy?
Day 2: Cutting, boiling and sauteing vegetables in 35 minutes
Day 3: Culinary class leftovers
Day 4: The dreaded tournage