The foundation of tasty soup is a good stock. In fact, the French refer to stock as fonds de cuisine, the foundations of cooking.

Culinary bible The Professional Chef says stocks are made by “gently simmering meaty bones, trim and/or vegetables in a liquid to extract their flavour, aroma, colour, body and nutrititive value. The liquid is then used to prepare sauces, soups, stews and braises and as a cooking medium for vegetables and grains.”

There is a distinct difference between a soup made with good stock than with just water or stock cubes. Soups that use stock as their base have a much deeper flavour and that flavour is definitely what we’re after.

I use chicken stock as the basis for most meat-based stews and soups, while vegetable stock is used in meatless soups and fish dishes. For chicken stock, I get carcasses from my butcher but if you don’t have that option, you can make stock from collecting the remants of the roast chickens from a few Sunday lunches.

Some complain that making stock is too time consuming and  nowadays, people aren’t only thinking of the time in terms of the number of hours spent making the stock but also the possible cost in terms of gas or electricity.

I did a bit of research about faster ways to make stock, and found several recipes for doing it in a pressure cooker which cuts the time down tremendously.

 

Pressure pros and cons

Now, the received wisdom on making stock is that a slow simmer needs to be maintained during the cooking process, or as Hugh Fearnley-Whititngstall says, “boiled harder than this stocks … will release and emphasise some undesirable flavours – a kind of chalkiness trapped deep in the bones, or even some ammonia-like notes associated with over-boiled meat.”

After searching books and the internet, I could find nothing to explain whether using a pressure cooker would cause the unpleasant effects Hugh mentioned, in fact in almost all the cases, the results were quite positive.

I was particularly impressed by this post on Cooking Issues, the French Culinary Institute’s blog which detailed the tests that some chefs and students did making stocks in different pressure cookers.

At the end of the article, Chef Dave Arnold dispatched these commonly-held beliefs about pressure cooked stocks, which convinced me that it was alright to proceed.

1. Pressure cooking will make the stock cloudy.
That is incorrect. The boiling in a pressure cooker is no more violent than in a pot, so stocks don’t get any cloudier. We have done many side-by sides to prove this.

2. Pressure cooking extracts bitter components.
No one has detected bitterness in pressure cooked stock we’ve made.

3. Not being able to skim the stock will introduce off-flavors.
We have not noticed this in any of our tests.

 

After a bit of testing, I came up with a recipe based on Lindsey Bareham’s A Celebration of Soup and as the photos show, the stock is deep and concentrated.

This is a basic stock recipe so feel free to experiment with different spices. For example, adding star anise and chopped ginger will lend an oriental flavour.

 

 

Pressure-cooked chicken stock

Ingredients

1 tablespoon groundnut oil

1 teaspoon coriander seeds, slightly crushed

225 g  medium diced onions

125 g  medium diced carrot

125g  medium diced celery

1 garlic clove

10-12 peppercorns, slightly crushed

1.5 kg chicken carcasses

Bouquet Garni
2 parsley stems

4 sprigs of thyme

1 bay leaf

 

Method

 

1. Heat the oil, put the vegetables and sweat until transluscent, about 10 minutes.

2. Add the chicken, and enough water to cover, about 1.5 litres, and bring to the boil.

3. Skim off the scum on the surface, add the peppercorns and bouquet garni, cover and cook at pressure for 30 minutes.

4. Cool, strain and taste. If you feel want a more concentrated stock, reduce the stock by a third.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 6th, 2011 at 22:51 and is filed under Food Matters, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.