Why can't I make good beef stock?

Cafe Society
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Ok, here goes. I had not quite three pounds of bones. I bought 3 more - so I have a mix of neckbones and ‘beef bones’ (doesn’t say what part, but at least one is so broad that I’m thinking leg). There is visible meat clinging to each.

3 pounds of ‘London broil’ steak, as the stew beef looked way too fatty. Cut the meet up, trimmed fat aggressively. Cubes of meat are in fridge, trimmings (about a cereal bowl full) in roasting pan with bones.

In oven right now at 400 for about another half hour, then I have ready five carrots, washed and leaf end removed, four stalks celery, washed and very bottom removed, four onions, stem and root ends trimmed and cut in half but with skins still on. After 45 minutes they’ll all go in the roasting pan as well, when I take it out to turn over the bones and add a small can of tomato paste before roasting some more. Various sites differed on whether to put the veg in at the start or later, I opted for later.

I am taking photos of each step.

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Yowza! Pic?

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You don’t need to be overly cautious about the fat. After cooking your stock, chill overnight and the fat will solidify on top, which can generally be removed as a disc.

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…and if you’re making chicken stock, then you save the fat frisbee for cooking with. Not sure what I’d do with a bunch of beef fat, except maybe use it for frying. It wouldn’t be quite as clean as tallow, so it would have the risk of giving your food a beefy flavor. Not always a bad thing. (But I don’t make beef stock myself, as it’s just too expensive for me to bother with. I can buy Better Than Bouillon a lot cheaper.)

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Heck, you don’t need to be cautious at all. It adds flavor and is all removed at the end. Definitely leave it on.

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I use it to fry the onions for stew, especially beef stew.

The only time I trim fat is if I’m going to be using the stock or broth the same day and don’t have time to defat it via the cooling method. For me, the cuts that are beefiest in flavor are the chuck, the short ribs, and brisket. Those are the ones I’d choose for beefiness in soups or stews.

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Beef fat is great for pan frying steaks and roasting an accompanying root veg.

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Next time I get around to it, I made the current batch while mrAru was home for Christmas and the day after so he could do the heavy work - we have to roast stuff in batches. Probably August or so.

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Here you are :smiley:

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Bumpdate of sorts: I simmered the bones for 6+ hours. Only got 5 quarts of water into the pot (ran out of room). The resulting stock is a beautiful color. I tasted it and it had a lot more flavor though still wasn’t something I’d drink on its own (maybe with salt etc.). We’ll see how it goes once it’s fully chilled and defatted and I try adding salt to some of it.

I think I’d use less tomato paste next time - the aroma wasn’t unpleasant but it was a bit jarring when I sniffed the simmering pot.

I used my electronic candy thermometer to make sure it wasn’t getting too hot, which was educational. Managed to get the stove set so that it was about 200 degrees the whole time.

It may be good (I sure hope so!!), but it’s a hell of a lot of work when Swanson’s does just fine for most purposes. When I need broth I can drink straight (when I need to be on clear liquids) I can go to the pho restaurant down the street. I’ve probably spent 30 bucks in ingredients so far!

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Vollrath (best thick Al): 20"x19".

Now I have to figure out what it would look like on my stove. Of course I have no room in my freezer anyway.

I borrowed a friend’s restaurant stockpot for a pig head and four pig knees/trotters thing once. Without a visual scale I’m useless with numbers; I have a physical memory, which is I could carry it (empty) down 14th st. for a block or so.

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Mama, don’t let aruvqan push you around. Soon you’ll be making stocks with this baby.

Bathtubs? We don’t need no steenkin’ bathtubs…

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Nice - I almost suckered mrAru into buying a steam kettle of about the same size from the DRMO auction but he quibbled that we had no steam generator. sigh It was sitting next to the most lovely Hobart mixer too …

And people find it weird that if I had the money I would turn part of the barn into more or less a commercial kitchen and install a 10x20 walk in freezer. If we had the space, we would go on that guided moose hunt up in New Hampshire, not because we want trophy moose heads, but for the meat. You know how much stock, sausage, steaks and other meat bits you can get off of a moose?!:eek::stuck_out_tongue:

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We are soulmates. I’ve often waxed eloquently about how if I won the lottery, I’d convert my 2-car garage into a commercial kitchen and then build another 2-car garage in front of it to actually park my car in. We have plenty of land, and the new commercial kitchen could open up onto the deck, making for really nice outdoor dining when weather permits.

I figure I just need about $200-$300K, minimum, for that. If anyone wants to make donations I’ll go start a kickstarter page. “Buy Athena a commercial kitchen! You get nothing back other than the warm feeling of letting a girl live her dream!”

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Range live-weight, yearling and male, 550-1300; avg. 890.

Live weight–head on, guts in, you know, alive–estimated from dressed weight, from Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center(dressed weight x 1.27) + 78.2

Going backwards, *x**1.27 + 78.2 (I’ll use decimals cuz they’re there, which is silly given round number in discussion) is, wait…, call it 780 lb. Call it 800.

Giving, assuming incorrectly that the figures are linear, Yield, edible portion, moose: Rib & shoulder–450 lb, “Boneless”–350 lb. (What, legs aren’t bones? Also, that packer notes Individual carcasses could easily vary 7% and in extreme cases may vary as much as 21% from the weights of cuts listed. Extent of gunshot area, aging time, closeness of trim, amount of fat on the carcass, cuts which must be trimmed because of wounds results from fighting, and cuts which must be trimmed or discarded because of contamination or spoilage are some of the factors which affect the weight of meat obtained.

Also I don’t know if that includes fat for sausages, etc. Your call. But definitely bigger than my kitchen freezer.
ETA: Damn you SD! No wonder I’m unemployed.

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Also, I’m proud of myself for doing math (algebra), when I’m always being smoked (calculus, other weird shit) in GQ.

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Oddly enough, used decent condition food service stuff can be occasionally found being sold off from failed restaurant kitchens [or as we do, look at the DRMO sales to see what is available. We went and looked at a sea going tug a couple years back for the hell of it. It ended up selling for less than what the engine was worth. Pity we didnt have the spare $300k.]

Hm, I already have a fry-well, so I need the Hobart mixer, proofing oven, self cleaning rotissery oven, chopper/grinder for really big batches of sausage, the combi-oven. I am thinking the viking 60 inch dual oven sealed burner gas range, and probably a 25 cu foot reach in freeze and 25 cu foot reach in fridge, both with the glass doors, and a good solid dish washer. I have a kiln so I can make my own dishes, and I have more than enough kitchen gear to mess with though I could use a 14 inch skillet to replace the one that got damaged in the move 20 odd years back. It is bent just enough it wobbles on the burner. Well, and of course the money to convert the middle floor of teh barn from storage to kitchen. :stuck_out_tongue:

Hm, range moose is pretty low fat, so I would have to buy up some good leaf lard or tallow - I hate a sausage that is too dry, it never seems to take up the seasoning. I did a killer good fresh lucanian sausage for Saturnalia dinner that was based on a good fatty cut of pig, the preground stuff looked dry as the Sahara. I might get some good fatback also and pre-lardoon a couple roasts, and cut in some slivers of frozen garlic/juniper/ginger/peppercorn puree so that when it thaws they flavor the meat.

And in general the cutters they have that part out larger game tend to figure that people want nice little packages of steaks, roasts, ground meat, diced stew meat and rib roasts, they don’t tend to include the bones - you have to ask for them. They also tend to cut the heads to make for taxidermied trophys. Since we are never after a trophy, we would end up having to really discuss what we want before the critter goes off to be cut. Though we do want the hides done hair on, and the bones for either cooking with or carving depending on the bone. And we want the offal - at least the heart, liver, kidneys, sweetbreads and brain.

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All that, and a crowd to come over every night to eat, enough cash that neither of us have to work anymore and to pay for the scullery maid to clean up after us.

If only we lived next door to each other we could half the price by sharing it. I could live with a commercial kitchen that was only available every other night, because I gotta go out and/or order pizza every once in a while!

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And it needs to be in Fresno or its environs - I want the access to the farmers markets there, and if it were on this 1- acre chunk of land I found in Madera I could raise my own fruits nuts and flakes too :stuck_out_tongue:

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Bumpdate to crow SUCCESS!!! (thanks to tips from y’all).

The stock was sitting in the fridge until this afternoon when I got it out to use it for its intended purpose (the vat of veggie-beef soup that’s simmering on the stove right now). I pried off that orange disc of fat (orange because of the tomato paste - think I might use a bit less of that next time), threw that out, fished out a quarter cup of stock to taste, and set the rest to simmering after adding in the beef cubes and THEIR water (slightly defatted - as I’d trimmed it before boiling separately, there wasn’t that cohesive disc like on the big pot).

I zapped the stock for 30 seconds, and added a few grinds of salt (too much as it turned out) and tasted - and it was actually good! Not 'famous the world around" good, but pretty darned flavorful.

So all in all: it was only a little more effort, though the expense was certainly higher than usual. I had to rejigger my timing slightly by doing the trimming/defatting of the actual meat at the beginning vs. while the bones were roasting.

Would I bother again? Only if I needed something with very significant flavor on its own, where Swanson’s wouldn’t do. If I needed it for, say, a clear-lquids diet, maybe - but it’s a lot easier (and requires less preplanning) to just pop down to the nearby pho shop and get a couple quarts of their broth which is delightfully fragrant and has just the right mix of sweet and savory spices (anise? allspice? something else?).

On the subject of chicken stock: We’ll save several carcasses in the freezer and boil up a vat of stock made from all that and it’s decent. Not “drink alone” decent but good enough that I’ll enjoy it with some carrots / celery thrown in and ladled over noodles, and good enough for other recipes.

The absolute best stock I make, hands down, is what comes from the Thanksgiving turkey: we brine that, and the brine has salt (of course!), sugar, apple juice, allspice, cloves, pepper, ginger, and bay leaves. So when making chicken soup at other times, I’ll usually add allspice and cloves in addition to the more traditional pepper and bay (must remember to add ginger next time…).