[HN Gopher] Lost in the Stock
___________________________________________________________________
Lost in the Stock
Author : objections
Score : 166 points
Date : 2023-02-19 07:56 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eater.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eater.com)
| vgel wrote:
| Interesting--I didn't know why the first ingredient is listed as
| broth--but the doom and gloom attitude was a bit much. E.g.:
|
| ```quote
|
| As Moss pointed out, even the FDA-mandated nutrition facts box
| that has appeared on most packaged food since the '90s "was
| conceived by none other than the food industry itself as a way of
| placating us." Back in the '70s, he explained, consumer advocate
| Ralph Nader was talking "really loudly and publicly about the
| evil-sounding" chemicals that the food industry was feeding to
| unknowing consumers. "As a way of countering that attack, [they
| figured] why don't we disclose lots of stuff on the labels of
| packages and if we do so, people will feel comforted by the idea
| that the government is keeping track and it must be okay," Moss
| said. "What I thought was our friend was in fact a conceit of the
| industry to lull us into complacency."
|
| ```
|
| Alternative read: activist makes a stink about a bad industry
| practice and industry self-regulates an effective response that
| helps the situation significantly. Is it perfect? Of course not,
| but my understanding is that the US has some of the strongest
| food labeling regulations in the world (similar to the EU's, much
| better than e.g. China) and they're being continuously tweaked to
| be better. As a consumer I can look at a food label and see
| basically everything that's in it that I care about, e.g. HFCS,
| and that means customer preferences drive company behavior. What
| this article sees as crass language about "good labeling" from
| the chicken concentrate manufacturers, I see as evidence that
| food labels _work_ to change corporate behavior. If there were no
| food labeling laws who 's to say that store-bought chicken stock
| would have any chicken in it at all?
|
| Maybe I just have more of a stomach for industrial food
| production? I mean I make homemade stock and it's delicious and
| in a different league than anything from the store, but sometimes
| a meal needs some chicken water and you have nothing in the
| freezer, you know? It's not so bad. If we want to talk about
| store-bought crimes against the culinary arts let's talk about
| store-bought _bread_.
| floren wrote:
| Yeah, the quotes from Moss had me rolling my eyes... shades of
| the guy at the coffee shop telling you how so-and-so invented a
| carburetor that ran on water, man, but GM had him killed.
| andreareina wrote:
| With ready access to bones/carcasses (either direct from the
| store or from saving them when cooking) I've found making stock
| just-in-time via electric pressure cooker to be very convenient
| as the pressure cuts down the time so I don't need to make
| anything ahead and freeze, and it's legitimately I-can-leave-home
| levels of set-it-and-forget-it. The only part I haven't yet
| figured out is a more convenient way of straining out the bones.
| Currently I pour the contents into another stock pot with a pasta
| insert. This works, but is _two_ additional large pieces to
| clean.
| chadash wrote:
| Buy a pasta straining spoon. It's basically a large spoon with
| holes in it that replaces a full size pasta strainer. Is it
| better than a pasta strainer? No. Is it easier to clean,
| absolutely. I use mine all the time.
| Hizonner wrote:
| Reason number 47,000,000,036 that governments worldwide should
| require total public disclosure of everything material to how
| anything sold to the public is made... including not just what
| ALL of the ingredients are, but their relative quantities, where
| they're sourced from, every detail of how they're processed,
| results of any quality or characterization tests, and any and all
| existing internal documentation of WHY any particular choices
| were made. If you're talking about machinery rather than food,
| then that includes all detailed design documents, source code,
| tooling designs and setups, and whatever else.
|
| And of course they should refuse to enforce any NDA that bears on
| any of that.
|
| Trade secrets are purely destructive, even from a "free market"
| perspective. Asymmetric information always makes markets less
| efficient. They should not be tolerated, let alone given any
| legal protection. You want to protect something, get a patent
| (which should still be harder to do than it is today).
|
| Unfortunately it would require global coordination, because
| markets (and businesspeople) would punish the first mover, just
| as markets punish any individual player who doesn't play the
| secrecy game. So I'm not exactly holding my breath, especially
| because people in business are so used to playing in the secrecy
| system that they can't imagine competing any other way.
| wpm wrote:
| There should at least be a way for me to punch in a UPC or some
| other product code and see exactly where all of the ingredients
| came from. The author had to go through a lot of effort and
| hoops just to kinda sorta confirm that these brands are using
| concentrate and from one of three major players. I don't need
| to know ratios or recipes, just tell me who touched the shit in
| this carton.
| vrdvn wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret
| adwi wrote:
| > In 2004, the National Environmental Trust tested 40 common
| consumer products; in more than half of them they found toxic
| substances not listed on the product label
| [deleted]
| ac29 wrote:
| Here's a fairly simple stock recipe I've been making for a few
| years.
|
| Usually I use saved chicken frames (the leftover bits from a
| whole chicken after cutting off the breasts and legs), but you
| can also get a whole chicken and cut it up into parts if you dont
| have anything saved. If you do use a mix with more meat, you can
| save the meat after making the stock for soups or salads.
|
| For each 1 lb of chicken meat and bones you'll need:
|
| 1 quart water
|
| 1 carrot, cut into large pieces
|
| 1 celery stalk, cut into large pieces
|
| 1 garlic clove, crushed
|
| 1/2 onion, quartered
|
| Herbs such as bay leaf, thyme, peppercorn
|
| (parsley stems are a nice addition if you have some, dont add the
| leaves though)
|
| Bring meat and bones to boil then reduce to a simmer, skimming
| froth. When clean enough, add everything else and continue simmer
| 2-8 hours (4 is good).
|
| Strain, let cool a bit, portion into 1qt/1L containers, fridge
| overnight, skim fat once solidified. Can freeze up to 6 months.
| kibibyte wrote:
| Pressure cooking (including the time to bring up to pressure,
| pressure cooking, and pressure release) can save you about 2-6
| of those hours. Depending on who you talk to, it's either
| almost as good or perhaps better than simmering for several
| hours.
| heisenzombie wrote:
| Highly agree with this. I was gifted an electric pressure
| cooker recently, and it has been a revelation for home stock
| making. It makes truly excellent stock in around 60-90
| minutes all up.
|
| If you're willing to wait the extra half hour for a slow
| pressure release, then you get a beautiful super-clear
| consomme-style stock because the pressurized environment
| means the liquid never boils. I've never achieved that in a
| stock pot, even if i'm being finicky about temperature
| control.
| downut wrote:
| I have, rarely to be true, had too much carrot flavor direction
| in the stock, so I go light on carrots. I've never had that
| happen with the onion or celery. My whole family are garlic
| fiends so there's likely going to be garlic in the terminal
| recipes so I never add it to the stock.
|
| I always start it at night after 8pm and do the coarse
| filtering with a basket and then 3 or 4x reduction[1] first
| thing the next morning. I put the hot coarsely filtered,
| reduced stock, including the fat, in a 1 gal plastic pitcher,
| filtering it again with a very fine mesh sieve, and stick it in
| the back of the fridge, uncovered. The _next_ morning first
| thing I scoop off the hardened fat that caps the top of the
| stock[2], and then I plop[3] the stock into a 1 gal freezer
| bag, slowly ease out all the air, seal it and lay it flat on a
| cookie sheet. Usually it 's around 1/2" to 3/4" thick. This
| means that once hard frozen, I can pull it out of the freezer
| on demand, let it sit flat on the counter for maybe 15 minutes,
| and then bend off as much or as little of mighty fine stock as
| I want. Consequently I use it all the time, and stock making is
| a required part of our family routine. I don't care how much
| time and effort it costs.
|
| [1] I've got a 25 yo Viking gas range (with a big through roof
| fan hood); both the overnight barely bubbling simmer (using a
| generic stock pot) and the vigorous boil of the reduction,
| using a 6 quart All-Clad copper chef saute pan, seem hard to
| manage, as I do almost entirely hands off, on _any_ consumer
| grade electric range I 've ever used.
|
| [2] After stupidly wasting too much of my lifespan I discovered
| what schmaltz is and now I use the stock fat for basically
| sauteeing any vegetables required in a recipe. I had always
| tossed the chicken skin in with all the other ingredients
| anyway!
|
| [3] It had better plop! All this effort and it needs to be a
| solid gelatin object at the end.
| wiredfool wrote:
| I keep the bones, carcasses, and other bits and pieces left
| over from meals and freeze them in ziplocs. I'll also toss in
| the gelatinous goo and other drippings from roasting whole
| birds, wings, or thighs. (Sometimes this is ~1/2 the volume of
| the resulting stock).
|
| When there's enough, or I'm running out of space in the
| freezer, I plop all of that into a 8 or 12 qt stockpot, with a
| couple carrots, an onion and a couple stalks of celery. Enough
| water to be mostly full. (If it's hard to fit the frozen bits,
| pour near-boiling water from a kettle over it to fill the pot).
|
| Bring to a boil, back off to a light simmer, let it go for a
| few hours.
|
| Skim off the bulk of the fat, (reserve or not, I had 1/2 L for
| 3.5L of stock yesterday) Pour it out through a colander into a
| large bowl to strain the chunks, skim most of the fat out and
| put it in quart jars for freezing. If stored in the fridge,
| it's basically solid.
|
| If you need more meaty bits, roast some wings. They've got the
| best mix of meat and collagen for stock.
|
| I just toss all the solids, the meat is mostly tasteless at
| that point, though the dog likes the carrots. (and occasional
| bits of the meat)
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Any time we do a grocery store / Costco chicken, I'll just
| throw all the bones into a pot with water, salt, and some
| carrot, celery and onions (or powder). I'll let it simmer for a
| few hours, and turn it off an hour before I plan to go to bed
| so it cools off before I put it in the fridge. It's really
| easy, and can be turned into delicious soup later in the week.
| unglaublich wrote:
| These stocks are just yeast extract water for taste with chicken
| residues for marketing. Yeast extract (or MSG, or e621) is the
| cornerstone of modern processed food. It replaces expensive
| processes and products aimed at improving taste with a cheap
| additive that attempts to approximate the traditional taste.
| Soups, meat products, stocks, potato chips, snacks, sauces,
| anything that's supposed to have an extravagant taste is
| generally just a bland tasting cheap scalable filler product with
| yeast extract for flavor.
|
| And consumers love it. They like the 'punch' of yeast extract
| flavor in everything. They love the low effort, low price
| products.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Of your last line, this sounds like an absolute win-win, right?
| pdpi wrote:
| You can achieve that effect with salt, msg and/or marmite
| (depending on what sort of flavour you're going for).
| Inversely, there's things you can achieve with _actual_ stock
| that you can 't with any of those, mostly related to the
| texture.
|
| If you don't know what's going on, it can be quite
| dispiriting to read about restaurant-style sauces, learn that
| one of the key ingredients is stock, and then fail to
| replicate the effect because the stock you're getting isn't
| the real deal. These days I just make my own stock (it's dead
| easy) and freeze it in ice cube trays for easy portioning.
| wpm wrote:
| Marmite _is_ yeast extract.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Yes, it is for most people. A minority of people don't like
| it though for a variety of reasons, mostly taste. But for
| them (more expensive), alternatives are available.
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| Yes, if you throw away all the nutritional concerns...
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Does well-made stock actually _have_ significant nutrition
| in it? Serious question.
| zug_zug wrote:
| Yes, per the article -- the reason store-bought stock
| (minimum water-to-protein ratio 1:135) never reduces to a
| gelatin (like homemade) is that the homemade has Much
| higher protein content.
|
| It's hard to know what other dimensions of healthiness
| apply to homemade over store bought.
| vkou wrote:
| > Yes, per the article -- the reason store-bought stock
| (minimum water-to-protein ratio 1:135) never reduces to a
| gelatin (like homemade) is that the homemade has Much
| higher protein content.
|
| How much of an effect on my _nutrition_ will replacing
| the stock part of my typical recipe with water have?
|
| I'd be highly surprised if it were at all meaningful. I
| don't add stock for nutrition, I add it for the taste.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| You can add powdered gelatin if you want the body of
| homemade.
| pdpi wrote:
| The reason you care about the protein is completely
| unrelated to nutrition, though. Rather, it's because of
| the flavour and mouth feel.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Can we just say texture?
|
| This weird phrase 'mouth feel' that 'foodies' have
| started to use is weird and subjectively to me, gross.
|
| No professional chef or restauranteur uses the phrase
| 'mouth feel' it's a weird internet phrase that has caught
| on a bit.
|
| Texture. Taste. Temperature.
|
| Mouth feel, tongue feel, heat feel.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| I get you but I believe mouth-feel is more than texture,
| for example it's the crunchiness of crisps in your mouth,
| and temperature alone doesn't cover the coolness of
| menthol.
|
| I certainly agree with you that a lot of pretentious long
| words are taking over from short words that do a
| perfectly good job, and it sucks.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| You used the perfect existing word for crunchiness.
| Crunchiness.
|
| But this is my personal hill and I've already built the
| mausoleum!
| ahefner wrote:
| I'm willing to die on this hill with you provided we also
| take up arms against the phrase "flavor profile".
| wiredfool wrote:
| Foodies may have 'just' started using it, but it's a term
| of art in the Food service/Food science world.
|
| It's not like computing doesn't have a lot of terms that
| seem redundant or over complicated if you aren't
| experienced with it.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Though your mouth is reporting good feedback on things
| that seem to have good nutritional value right? Of course
| you can easily confuse it (eg with lots of sugar), I just
| mean the distinction you're making might not be needed.
| ginko wrote:
| I despise yeast extract. It leaves a noticeable aftertaste in
| my mouth that won't go away for hours. I'd much prefer if
| brands just stuck with MSG but for some reason every single
| type of chips other than plain salt is adding yeast extract
| around here.
| joshspankit wrote:
| I suspect that the aftertaste is one of the selling features
| for brands: if you take a bite, enjoy it, and then an
| aftertaste tries to settle in, you might be likely to go for
| another bite to cover it up and repeat that until the product
| is gone and you want more.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Seems like that strategy would back-fire. No one would buy
| that brand again because of the bad aftertaste.
| joshspankit wrote:
| And yet here we are.
|
| It turns out that out of quality, consistency, and price
| all they really need is consistency.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not too fond of it, either. I recently found chips
| with paprika flavor that only had potato, salt, paprika
| powder! They tasted wonderful. A friend of mine thought them
| 'boring' and liked the common ones with yeast extract more.
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| "Stock." Finance? Well, "eater.com". Ben Eater? Maybe about
| electronics. Ah, chicken stock.
| Havoc wrote:
| I've found a strategy that works well for home use: Freeze meat
| offcuts etc over time. Nuke accumulated stuff in pressure cooker
| every couple weeks, pour into a ice cube tray & freeze.
|
| Especially useful for a flexitarian diet. The days where the main
| protein is say beans adding one of the above beef based cube
| helps give it a bit more complexity
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| I've normally found that you want to strain and cool it first,
| as otherwise you end up with a layer of fat in your stock,
| which tends to not be as nice.
| Havoc wrote:
| It just settles on top of the cube & goes into whatever I'm
| cooking.
|
| While pouring I ensure it's evenly spread so that none of the
| cubes end up fat heavy
| guessbest wrote:
| I pull the layer of fat off the top after I cool down the
| chicken stock and it looks as rich and creamy as butter but
| with a slight chicken flavor. Some people call it schmaltz.
| It makes a great coating for a copper pan when cooking
| scrambled eggs or really anything pan fried.
| Graziano_M wrote:
| What I do is cool down in the fridge over night, skim the
| solidified fat, and then freeze. I'll often get a portion of
| the skimmed stock and reduce it to a demi glace before
| freezing, often just to save space in the freezer, since I
| try to make at least a gallon at a time.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yeah, that's generally my approach. Definitely don't freeze
| it in freezer bags though, as they stick together making it
| difficult to use it in the intended amounts.
| ac29 wrote:
| I do this too - buying whole chickens is generally half the
| price/lb of individual cuts, and you get the leftover bones/etc
| to make proper stock.
| MikeDelta wrote:
| > If manufacturers were truly making chicken stock "just like
| your grandma did," it would be highly perishable, incredibly
| expensive, and shelf-unstable.
|
| I wonder why grandma's chicken stock would not be shelf-stable
| using old or modern food-preservation techniques.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| It is. We can it in mason jars at home. The fat floats to the
| top and solidifies, so even if the seal on the (sterilised!)
| jar is imperfect, the fat preserves the broth by preventing
| microbe incursion. Also helps to make it good and salty, and
| concentrate it down until it just begins (while boiling hot) to
| be viscous. When cool, it's thick and gloopy.
|
| So long as everything is good and hot when you seal, you're
| good.
|
| Quite often we'll can it with a few legs in there - they taste
| fabulous after a year of marinading.
|
| You can buy it in stores in France, no problem - or duck broth,
| or goose, or whatever you fancy.
|
| https://www.beyondthechickencoop.com/canning-chicken-stock/
| nerdponx wrote:
| Several brands sell it in the USA now as well.
| ac29 wrote:
| FYI, that fat layer is doing nothing to prevent microbial
| incursion and will turn rancid if left at room temperature
| not properly sealed. Proper home canning procedures should
| leave a good, sterile seal though (or just freeze it, which
| is what I do).
| chrisoverzero wrote:
| > So long as everything is good and hot when you seal, you're
| good.
|
| Good, maybe. Safe, no. Chicken stock is not acidic enough
| even for water-bath canning - it must be pressure-canned.
| Anything else is a risk of botulism.
| 13of40 wrote:
| What you said got me wondering about whether you could fix
| that by adding some vinegar, which led me to this
| interesting article:
| https://www.clemson.edu/extension/food/canning/canning-
| tips/...
|
| Tl;dr your canned food can get a fungus that eats the
| vinegar, reducing the acidity, and allowing botulinum to
| grow.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| And this is why my wife is in charge of canning - yes,
| these go through the pressure cooker, and I should probably
| have mentioned that!
| antihipocrat wrote:
| Or just sell it as a frozen good. Even the author mentioned
| freezing homemade stock for later use.
| nerdponx wrote:
| They do both now. It's just not as popular because Americans
| have no idea what they're missing.
| adingus wrote:
| If I had to summarize what I thought of this article in one
| sentence I'd grab this quote:
|
| ""Raw material (chicken frames) are cooked in water to specific
| solids content," the representative wrote."
|
| The the product, the rep and the company are so disconnected from
| reality that they can't even call a chicken bone a "chicken
| bone". They call it a "chicken frame", like some strange chicken
| nugget defecating robot.
| nerdponx wrote:
| The cruelty and horror of industrialized farming wouldn't be
| possible without this level of detachment.
| andreareina wrote:
| Because it isn't just bone, there's a lot of skin and other
| connective tissue that goes along for the ride. I've parted out
| whole chickens so I wouldn't call me disconnected from the
| reality of it and calling it the frame makes perfect sense to
| me. "Carcass" is another word that's in common use.
| adingus wrote:
| I guess this is just a case of me being annoyed because of my
| own ignorance. I wasn't aware that 'frame' was a common term,
| like carcass.
| glitchc wrote:
| Frame sounds like carcass, mainly the ribcage devoid of major
| sections of meat (breast, legs, etc.).
| farco12 wrote:
| This is going to be the case with any sufficiently scaled
| business. I feel the same way about how marketing and sales
| people talk about human beings as an opportunity to qualify for
| their sales funnel.
|
| I'm sure others might feel similarly disgusted how software
| developers and business people talk about users. I personally
| find it gross that high spenders are commonly referred to as
| whales.
| sakerbos wrote:
| All of a sudden I have a newfound love for homemade stock. I
| guess I'm making some tomorrow. Recipe looks really good too!
| manmal wrote:
| Tangentially related, chicken bones are unusually high in lead
| and chicken bone broth is often quite contaminated:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23375414/
| jareklupinski wrote:
| > In a way, maybe I was hoping for a horrifying crime --
| something nefarious and real, like the Australian horse and
| kangaroo meat scandal of 1981.
|
| Why is there no wiki article about this?
|
| https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/meat-sub...
|
| "The 1981 discovery that horsemeat and kangaroo meat were being
| substituted for beef in meat exported by Australia to the United
| States..."
| MarcScott wrote:
| We had a far more recent one in the UK, that does have a
| Wikipedia article -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_horse_meat_scandal
| hummus_bae wrote:
| [dead]
| pimlottc wrote:
| Not that it excuses the chicanery, but it is worth noting that
| kangaroo meat is perfectly fine and commonly available in
| Australian supermarkets.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| how is it? I've seen it a few times at those 'exotic food
| conventions' but never worked up the courage...
| pimlottc wrote:
| If you like venison, you'd probably enjoy it; it's
| somewhere between that and beef. It's commonly sold as
| mince, but like venison, it's quite lean, so you may have
| to adjust recipes a bit if you want to sub it in for ground
| beef. You can also get it in fillets and cook it like a
| steak.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| It's perhaps a bit gamey, but I appreciated having it as an
| option while I was down-under. I'm allergic to beef, so
| it's more variety. Well prepared, it's just as good as any
| other red meat such as lamb.
| skilled wrote:
| Eater is making an interesting choice with its cookie policy. It
| doesn't matter if you click Accept (the only option!) or not, it
| will still load the TikTok video, a platform that's well-known
| for its notorious tracking.
|
| "By choosing I Accept, you consent to our use of cookies and
| other tracking technologies."
|
| Is Eater able to make an exception for TikTok in this context? At
| least for the news sites that I consume, they will typically
| overlay TikTok/Facebook/Instagram content with a form that asks
| you to reveal the said content in exchange for that platform
| getting data on you.
|
| Here it looks like Eater just doesn't care at all.
|
| Sorry for being so off-topic, but I just couldn't help to notice
| it.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Of course they don't care. What makes you think they would
| care?
| wpm wrote:
| I'll never understand the utility of autoplaying videos,
| especially ones that are barely related or more often
| completely unrelated (looking at you local and national news
| websites). Like, is this supposed to just annoy me? Is that
| annoyance going to make it more likely I'm going to stay on the
| site, which I'm blocking all the ads on anyways?
|
| It's just absolute cancer.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Gaming engagement metrics, probably
| throwaway47291 wrote:
| Maybe this is controversial and not what the GDPR says but IMO,
| it's up to tiktok to ask.
| throwaway2jz34 wrote:
| I don't know. Between the pihole & content blocking plugins I
| didn't even notice it had any third party content. Combine that
| with the use of reader mode and all I got was a wall of text
| that made the site as pleasant as browsing the web in the 1990s
| from the CLI :)
|
| And to be more on topic...I quite enjoyed this article, and
| wish more people would have this level of concern for & desire
| to know _the truth_.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Look, if you want to make a quick stock from store brought
| products, just add some bouillon and gelatin to it. If you want a
| bit more flavor and you have time, you can boil the crap out of
| some mirepoix and whatever bundled herbs you want to flavor it.
|
| It's never going to be as good as the real thing, but then again,
| you're never going to eat the real thing by itself.
| ergonaught wrote:
| This was so well written I wish everyone producing similar
| content would study it and learn from it.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I'm really not a fan of even long form reporting bringing the
| author into the story so much. It feels very much an artifact
| of this generation of reporters who seek celebrity as much as
| (more than?) telling an informative and neutral story.
| mrmekon wrote:
| I'm sure it has increased over time as people imitate their
| heroes, but first-person journalism is certainly not at all
| unique to "this generation"; it was already a big element of
| New Journalism in the 1960s:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Journalism
|
| Is it surprising that journalists who grow up reading Hunter
| Thompson go on to write like Hunter Thompson? I think that's
| a pretty natural progression, without needing to blame
| generational narcissism. If anything, it seems like World War
| II was the major turning point for involving the author into
| the story.
| wcedmisten wrote:
| Personally I felt more engaged with the story due to its
| narrative style.
|
| A lot of the corporate responses wouldn't have as much impact
| if they were stated more neutrally like "These 3 stock
| manufacturers declined to comment", or just providing their
| nonanswers sequentially.
|
| The author's bio also describes him as "chef, author and host
| of the YouTube cooking show Don't Panic Pantry", so I think
| the style is more appropriate here than it would be written
| by a professional journalist on a more strictly "news" site.
| fwlr wrote:
| Restaurants are in the sweet spot of the economy of scale when it
| comes to things like sauces and stocks. Households can be a bit
| too small; making chicken stock is practical, but not effortless.
| Commercial processed food corporations on the other hand are too
| big; they can afford to formulate a witch's brew of Flavoring
| 31A, Refined Extract Concentrate, and Butylated Hydroxysorbate
| that 9 out of 10 focus group participants agree reminds them of
| chicken stock. But restaurants have the manpower, facilities, and
| quantity of ingredients to make a lot of stocks and sauces from
| scratch and iterate on the recipe and process until it's really
| good. (Once you get to about five chefs in the kitchen brigade
| you start to see the position of saucier, a chef whose job is
| just preparing sauces.) If the menu mentions soup, broth, stock,
| jus, or demi-glace I make a beeline for it and I'm usually in for
| a treat.
| jghn wrote:
| One thing that changed the dynamic for me was adding gelatin to
| store bought stock. I think I originally got that tip from
| Kenji (who was quoted in the article). If not it was definitely
| from Serious Eats.
|
| It's nowhere near as good as the real deal, but it provides a
| great effort to value ratio.
| wpm wrote:
| Yeah the gelatin trick is huge. Store-bought stock/broth does
| a decent job of _tasting_ like real chicken stock, and then
| the added gelatin does a decent job of _feeling_ like real
| chicken stock.
|
| It's as close to the real deal as it is probably worth to the
| home cook. I recently made a huge batch of beef stock _and_
| turkey stock over the same two days. After skimming the fat,
| all the filtering, heating and cooling, and portioning, then
| freezing, I hit me that while this stock is damn good, I had
| spent an absolute shitton of money, burned a bunch of fossil
| fuels, spent a bunch of electricity, and a lot of time, for a
| couple quarts of stock. A quart of kitchen basics low sodium
| and two packets of Knox gelatin get me 80% of the way there
| for fractions of the cost and time.
| twoodfin wrote:
| The trick is to freeze the stock in ice cube trays (the
| latex ones that make 2" cubes), and divide the spoils of
| your effort among a future dozen or so recipes. The
| marginal value of half a cup of homemade stock in a dish is
| typically massive.
| pellucidar wrote:
| The trick is to make stock in an Instant Pot (or other
| electronic pressure cooker). It's low effort and can be
| done with accumulated frozen scraps.
| don-code wrote:
| I'd argue that restaurants _don't_ have the manpower to do
| this. Restaurant margins are small as it is, and while I don't
| have concrete numbers to back this statement up, it feels like
| designating (or even hiring) someone to upcycle products like
| chicken bones into stock would be prohibitively expensive, in
| comparison to just buying prepackaged stock in bulk.
| blovescoffee wrote:
| Except prepackaged stock is either cheap or good but never
| both.
| aintgonnatakeit wrote:
| Except that industrial stock is expensive compared to
| trimmings (free) and tastes terrible, and the cook assigned
| to make stock is also doing other tasks.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| They sell demiglace in boxes and bags too about 10g per 100ml. If
| it's a matter of reduction of water, that'll make it 3x to 10x
| more expensive for the same amount of bones/carcass, if we use
| the 1-3g per 100 numbers in the article.
|
| I was curious and went to check and this actually tracks based on
| Waitroses (UK) house brand stock and demiglace. Their stock is
| 2.5g and 48p per 100ml and demiglace is 10g and PS1.9 per 100ml,
| 4x the protein content and around 5x the price
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