My Introduction to, and Growing Obsession with, Stock

Over the past year, my interest in broths and stocks has increased with each passing week. My first encounter was at Hulbert’s, where Chris would save vegetable trimmings--carrot skins, thick, white celery ends, and onion roots--in a pot in the cooler. Never broccoli or cauliflower, he said, because they produce a “skanky” broth. Once enough scraps had accumulated they were thrown in a stock pot, covered with water, simmered for eight hours, and strained. At the time this was just a curious process that I figured I would try at home, eventually.

Then I read Alton Brown’s I’m Just Here for the Food, which details the process of making stock from chicken carcasses. The “sauces” section of that book convinced me of the usefulness of having a ready reserve of stock in the freezer. I now thought of stock as a useful trick up my culinary sleeve.

During the summer, when Lisa and I were making most of our meals from scratch, we were often wishing we had stock so we could make soups, sauces, and gravies. Going through lots of produce and a few whole chickens, we gathered enough scraps to produce the occasional batch of the elusive liquid.

Furthermore, we recently bought stainless steel cookware, and the sticky bits left in the pan after we cook meat are absolutely begging to be deglazed with stock and made into an accompanying sauce.

The final blow came while reading Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential, where I found lines like, “Stock is the backbone of good cooking,” and “Life without stock is barely worth living.” Needless to say, these words added an almost desperate urgency to my experiments with stock.

I started some research. Very few professional sources recommended the use of cutting board scraps. I guess this makes sense, as consistency is usually an obsession of the restaurant industry, and the hodge-podge stock pot produces a different product every time. It’s still a great method for the home kitchen, though.

Using fresh, whole vegetables for a mere stock seemed criminal at first, but by the last harvest day at our CSA, Lisa and I were completely overwhelmed. Even after freezing and canning what we could, there was a surplus of the very vegetables that most vegetable stock recipes call for.

I eventually decided to try a Robuchon recipe that uses vegetables, herbs, dry white wine and star anise. I’ve appended the recipe below. I also gleaned the following advice from Joel: simmer very, very gently, otherwise the finished stock will be cloudy.

I set to work. When the mixture first started to simmer, all I could smell was anise, and I was worried that its unique taste would completely obscure the subtler aromatics. By the time the stock was done, the anise had married well with the others. The wine added a mild, pleasant acidity.

I'm hooked. My next experiment will be beef stock. Apparently the first step in that process is procuring beef bones. I need to befriend a butcher. Fast.

Vegetable Stock (From The Complete Robuchon)

• 3 stalks celery, roughly chopped
• 2 leeks, roughly chopped
• 2 carrots, roughly chopped
• 1 onion, roughly chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 2 cups dry white wine
• 2 whole star anise
• 1 bouquet garni (3 stems parsley, thyme, and 1/2 bay leaf)
• 2 scant teaspoon coarse salt
• pepper
• 6 1/4 cups water

Combine ingredients and simmer very gently for three hours, skimming foam from surface every half hour. Yields about one litre of stock.

Canada Goose Wild Rice

Another mind blow. Today Judy showed up with a bag of Canada Goose wild rice from Fort Assiniboine. This shocked me. Partly because it is an expensive, luxurious ingredient. Partly because as a child I was fed mostly potatoes, so rice always seemed exotic to me. (Wild "rice" is actually a misnomer: it's the seed of zizania grasses, which are not part of the rice family, though they are closely related.) Anyways, turns out it's indigenous to lakes across Canada and the northern United States.

Raspberry Liqueur

Ever since Neil brought me a recipe for limoncello from Capris, I've been eager to try some sort of fruit infusion of alcohol. My surplus of raspberries from Roy's seemed like divine providence. Here is my recipe for raspberry liqueur.


Raspberry Liqueur (adapted from a souvenir-bar-towel recipe for limoncello...)

• 750g raspberries
  
• 750mL Everclear grain alcohol
• 750mL water
• 750g white sugar
• 500mL lemon juice, strained of pulp and seeds
  

Pour the grain alcohol and raspberries into a large glass container. Mash the berries, cover the mixture tightly, and leave for two weeks. This is the infusion.

Pour the infusion through a wire strainer to remove the berry pulp. Discard said pulp.

Make a simple syrup of 750g white sugar and 750mL of water on the stove. Cool to room temperature and combine with berry infusion.

None of the acidity of the berries survives the infusion stage. At this point, with the darker raspberry flavour, the strong taste of alcohol, and the sickly sweet syrup, the solution honestly tastes a lot like cough medicine. It needs the transforming power of lemon. Mix in the lemon juice, and allow some time (a few days?) for the flavours to combine. Strain through a coffee filter to remove the finer sediment.

I finished with about 2.5L of liqueur which was almost 30% alcohol by volume. At this strength, somewhere between a stiff schnapps and vodka, I was expecting to have to dilute my liqueur with pop. However, when poured over ice, it is surprisingly (and dangerously?) easy to drink straight. Summer in a glass.

Raspberry Jam

It's the height of berry season, and I just picked several pounds at Roy’s Raspberries, west of the city on highway 16A. The bulk of the harvest was frozen for later use as ice-cream topping and crumble filling, but plenty of berries were kept for experimentation. With Lisa’s recent purchase of a garage-sale canning pot, my first project was a winter’s supply of raspberry jam.

I was happy to find the following recipe for traditional raspberry jam: one volume raspberries and one volume white sugar. It’s ridiculous to measure raspberries by volume, but I’m a sucker for a simple ratio. As I was working with honey instead of sugar, my recipe and process looked like this:

• Two parts heated, mashed raspberries.
• One part heated honey.
• Simmer until thickish.
• Jar.
  

The jam tasted great: much brighter than the store-bought variety. Much seedier, too. This was my first experience canning food, and it went fairly smoothly, I think. If in a year I have botulism, I'll change my answer.

When I mentioned to people at work that I spent my day off making jam, I was confusingly dubbed “Aunt Jemimah” for the rest of the week.

Oats!

In the last few days I have learned a lot about oats. For example: whole oats are called groats. Not impressed? Fine. Here are the main "styles" of processed oats:

• Rolled oats: steam-rolled flat. I think the most popular style.
• Steel-cut oats: each groat is cut (by steel, I guess) into a few pieces. Sometimes called Irish oats.
  
• Quick Oats: the oats are steel cut and then steam rolled, even flatter than rolled oats, reducing cooking time (hence the name).

Why have I become a scholar of oats? This week Judy brought us a 20kg bag of rolled oats and a 20kg bag of quick oats, both from the Can-Oat mill in Manola, and each costing about $25. While Lisa and I are pushing shopping carts through organic grocery stores and reading labels to try and find local food, Judy is hitting the highway and visiting industrial milling operations and talking to farmers.

As dry goods, our oats will keep for months, as long as we store them in a cool, dry place. Regardless of how well they keep, the simple fact that there is almost a hundred pounds of oats in my house has made me anxious to start figuring out how I can use them. Hence the oat research.

The first information I came across was historical. Several sources that I consulted had a quote from Samuel Johnson's dictionary, which defines oats as a grain "which in England is generally given to horses, but which in Scotland supports the people." Apparently the common Scottish reply went something like, "That's why England produces such fine horses, and Scotland such fine men."

Eventually I found some practical information on consuming large amounts of oats. Here are the down and dirty, super-simple recipes in which I plan to eat my bounty.

Basic Granola Recipe

• 2 cups rolled oats
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1/8 cup cold-pressed canola oil
• pinch of salt

Combine all the ingredients and mix with a spatula. Spread evenly on a parchment-lined tray and bake at 325F. Watch the oats around the very edges of the pan. When they are just starting to brown (about eight minutes), remove the tray from the oven. Flip and redistribute the oats as best you can, then return the tray to the oven until, once again, the oats on the perimeter start to brown (roughly another four minutes). Watch carefully: they'll burn quickly. At this point the oats will feel soft and moist, but as they cool they will become crisp. That's just the base. Add dried fruit, nuts, spices, and dairy products as you see fit. I like mine in yoghurt, with dried saskatoons.

Basic Porridge Recipe

• 1/2 cup quick oats
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 tbsp honey

Combine ingredients in bowl and cook in microwave until milk as been absorbed by oats. Stir to distribute honey. If you're feeling wild you can throw some rolled oats in for more texture.

Chamomile

Ever since Lisa’s mom showed me the chickweed and lamb’s quarters in my driveway, I have been walking the streets of Edmonton with a downward gaze, trying to identify sidewalk creepers and back-alley flowers.

I recently stooped over a new find. A short plant with fingerling leaves similar to anise or dill. Developing flower-heads promised a yellow bloom. I uprooted the plant and smelled the leaves, hoping for the licorice of anise. Instead I was completely overwhelmed by a thick, impossibly sweet and floral odour. It was a familiar smell, both from rural Ontario and Calgary. It was a smell I had often wondered about as a child.

I described the appearance and perfume of the plant to many an “elder.” My mother guessed sweetclover. Judy finally posited chamomile. Sure enough, a Google Images search returned pictures of plants with the same foliage, and flowers that looked just like daisies.

Now that I recognize the plant, I see it on almost every sidewalk, unkempt yard, and alleyway crack. Now, in the second week of July, most of the small plants in driveways have not flowered, but a few choice plants in yards and fields have blossomed into smiling yellow faces wreathed by white petals.

A city website says that scentless chamomile (Matricaria perforata) is a common weed in Edmonton, so I'm inclined to think that this is the variety I keep seeing (even though, as I said, the leaves have a very pronounced scent). The type usually used for tea is German chamomile (Matricaria recutita). I decided to test the tea-worthiness of our local problem-plant.

Most internet sources that I consulted said to use the flowers to make tea. A foraging compendium suggested the leaves. I tried both. The flower makes a passable tea for sure. The leaf brew has a distinct fennel aftertaste.

Part of our local-eating regime has been the denial of certain “exotic items”. These include, predictably, citrus fruit, wine, and chocolate, but the luxury whose absence has caused the most grief has been coffee.

I drink coffee for three reasons: the taste, the caffeine, and the ritual. A number of substitutes can stand in for any one of these traits, but few can replace all three. With chamomile, I thought I was getting closer with a hot drink that would give me a good-morning buzz. Lisa gently corrected me: chamomile is a relaxant, and the principle ingredient in “sleepy time” teas. So it’s the opposite of coffee. At least it will provide ritual: the slow sipping of a hot, floral drink. I’ll settle for that.

The whole experiment has me thinking more about foraging, generally: wondering if I would be able to safely identify edible mushrooms, or perhaps find some wild berry patches. Worth investigating, I think.

Weed-Eater (A Whole New Meaning)

Lisa’s mother, Judy, shared a distant memory from childhood. One spring evening, unexpected visitors came knocking just before dinner, and her mother was in a panic to find food for them. The children were therefore sent out to pick lamb’s quarters, a weed that grew in the yard. Chickweed, too, was occasionally brought to their table.

I listened to this tale with skepticism of two kinds. Firstly that any weed would be pleasant to eat, and secondly that I would find these weeds in my yard. Judy took me to my own alleyway and within ten seconds had identified both lamb’s quarters and chickweed. Thus began the sidewalk sample platter.

The lamb’s quarters had the same creamy texture as spinach. When we took it inside and heated it on the stove it wilted just like spinach, too. The chickweed was a bit tougher, and the slight woody flavour was a constant reminder that I was eating a weed.

When trying to find more edible weeds that grow in Edmonton, I happened upon this rarely-to-almost-never updated website.