A lot of people who cooks already knows that stock adds a layer of flavor to the dish. There are a few kinds of stock and each of them is used for specific combinations: vegetables, mushroom, meat, chicken, turkey, fish...
From trash to treasure.
Generally, stocks contain four essential parts:
- Flavoring ingredient: meats
- Liquid: mostly water, but you can also use remouillage (a kind of stock made of bones that have already been used once to make a stock - it's clearer and weaker)
- Aromatics: herbs, black pepper
- Mirepoix: the famous combination of carrots, celery and onion
But my focus here is to explore the stock made using food that otherwise would be wasted. I am talking about ends, tops, peels, stems, leaves, bones. Carrots, broccoli, onions, celery, mushrooms, cauliflowers, garlic, potatoes, spring onion, cilantro, parsley... These (and more) are all the ingredients that I used for my stock. Also I had some turkey bones frozen from last Thanksgiving.
My stock was a little bit dark. If you want something clear, this is not appropriate. But generally, for what I cook, this stock is really good. I used a Ziplock bag a left it in the freezer, and as I was cooking I store all my peels, stems, tops and ending on this bag. One day, when it was full, I made the stock. Put everything together on a stock pan, water until everything is covered, some black peppercorns and let it cook for about 1 hour. Then I divided into containers to be frozen and others to be used right away.
Turkey stock made with vegetables scraps.
The real deal here is that you can keep this bag frozen for six months. So you have all this time to collect food that otherwise would go to the trash. Why not repurpose everything and make something that will actually save some money? Plus it's homemade, so you know all the ingredients and everything that is going to your dish. In other words: healthy food.
Resting in my freezer right now. Waiting to become a treasure for future recipes.
Right now I have some frozen on my freezer. This recipe gave me 4 containers - about 2 liters of stock. So I have a lot of it for sure! And I already have a bag on freezer with chicken bones and vegetables scraps being filled up for the next batch.
Hello bag full of flavor!
Also, I would like to add that some of these days I bought a rib steak, with the bone. Then I used the bone to do a broth using only water. I wanted to do this way because I could use for my dog food and I was a bit lazy at the time to add carrots and celery - but this is something you could do. Since dogs can not have pepper and onion, I would skip this ingredients, but the rest is safe for them (but ask your veterinarian before giving anything to him/her, ok?).