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barton cole :: veni, vedi, vero scripsi
 Wednesday, February 11, 2009
As I sit down to write this, I'm poised to make my son a couple of crêpes au chocolat for breakfast, as soon as he emerges from the shower. It's standard bill-of-fare; the kitchen is the early productive one, at my house. That and the cat, who's already been outside patrolling in the dark, twice.
I've been pondering beef broth. I just made a batch, and as always, was reminded of an early food mentor, Jeff Smith, who was the well-known and notorious Frugal Gourmet on television in the 1990s. I hooked up with him early in what became my long-and-checkered culinary career; his influence guides me often, still.
I had left home at eighteen, and was living near my old school in North Tacoma. I had plenty of money saved from my work as a restaurant cook (I had begun cooking in restaurants when I was seventeen), but my parents were still apparently concerned about my financial state, so although I didn't need to work, they thought I should get a job.
I assured them that I had excellent prospects. In fact, I told them, "It looks like Jeff Smith wants to hire me," but I hadn't even been in to talk to him. I just wanted to give them something they'd want to hear to get them off my back.
Jeff had a cooking show at the time, but only on KTPS 62, the Tacoma Public Schools channel. He also had a kitchen shop and café right across the street from the high school, where I was finishing my senior year: "The Chaplain's Pantry."
The next day, I thought I should at least give some truth to my white lie, and went into Jeff's shop to ask about work.
He hired me on the spot, and set me to work as the evening cook at his restaurant in downtown Tacoma (just at the onset of its renaissance), "The Judicial Annex." It was a huge dining room and little kitchen next to the University of Puget Sound Law School, hence the name, and hence the extreme lunch business. Jeff made good food, and they thronged to it.
The downtown core was dead at night, so the place would have rare customers, but he needed prep work to support the lunch business, like bakers working in the middle of the night. This was to be my job.
On my first day there, in the spring of 1981, he asked me, "Do you know how to make beef stock?"
I did, theoretically: roast bones, simmer, strain, reduce - but had never done so, and told him.
"Okay, Cole," - he always called me that, like he was my junior-high buddy -
"I'm going to show you how to make beef stock. This is the only way to make it; you're always going to make it this way, you're never going to make it any other way."
Rather emphatic, but - as if I had knelt in the mud and the rain, while the lightning flashed, I swore a solemn vow: I never did make it any other way.
This was the first of many of the foundational skills I learned from Mr. Smith. A cook must know their way around a knife, and have a sound culinary background, familiarity with the fundamental principles and patterns - from making the stock all the way to improvised preparation of pastries.
From the beef broth that day, we made soupe a l'oignon, French onion soup, with the classic Gruyére crouton broiled on top. Cut a lot of onions for that one.
He served potato salad with the sandwiches, as an optional side, so that meant cutting up fifty pounds of potatoes every couple of days. I didn't yet have my own Henkel chef's knife, but spent a lot of time using one, cutting vegetables and occasionally myself.
I went on to have a career in restaurant kitchens, and relied upon the culinary lessons from my years with Jeff throughout. Years later, I maintained a friendship wth him, and would visit his condominium above Tom Douglas's restaurant, Etta's, in the Pike Place Market. We'd sit and have wine, or a martini, and talk about food. I saw his last television episode there; it had been shot and edited a year or so before his final broadcast, so I had a sneak preview.
I had some experience with his cooking show, early on, before he got picked up by PBS and was not only broadcast nationwide, but acquired an international reputation. When he was still doing the KTPS gig, I would occasionally be the one to assemble the dish that would emerge from the oven, in that time-compression of the TV cooking show: "In the oven it goes, and [forty-five minutes later,] when it comes out it looks like this."
But I would drop in to visit him at the market; he kept a low profile, being a national celebrity, but was a notorious resident of the public market - exactly where a guy like him should be found, deep in the middle of the culinary scene, right at the sources of the food for the table.
Once, my colleagues and I, from out on our island, went into America for a field trip, which included spending the day at the Public Market, followed by lunch at a fish restaurant.
The market is a popular destination with tourists - including the gruesome public spectacle of Pike Place Fish, where the fishmongrels throw the customer's fish up to a guy who wraps it. People flock to see this ghastly spectacle, just like filling medieval squares to watch an execution.
Having run a kitchen a few blocks away, though, and having spent three or four days there a week, I had seen what I needed to see of the market, so wasn't as enthusiastic about the prospects of spending my day there. [1]
No problem - I called Jeff and made arrangements to spend the day with him.
He took me to lunch, too, at the fish restaurant underneath his place. A patron bought us a nice bottle of wine (celebrity has perks, it would seem), and after lunch, he said, "Let's go visit the kitchen," just like he was on TV. He got up, beckoned me to follow, and into the kitchen we went.
I thought it was quite a liberty; I don't think he had made arrangements. I've been in kitchens that were slammed, and it's not generally a nice environment for visitors. And yet, I have been visited in the kitchen by celebrities, and busy or not, it's nice.[2]
But there, behind the hot line, was a guy I had worked with, briefly, some fifteen years before. He came through as a cook for a time in a kitchen I worked in, and here he was, fifteen years later - you could see this pass through his mind as his eyes fell and his shoulders slumped - still just a lunch cook - and there I was, visiting his kitchen, the guest and companion of this famous guy.
Later, I met up with my chums and had lunch at this fish restaurant, but I was sated and had eaten a great meal, so I got by with fresh ale.
One time, a friend invited me and my wife to dinner at Campagne, a nice, if too tiley and loud, French restaurant at the market. We'd have a long drive to get there, and would be travel-rumpled, but I thought maybe we could stop by Jeff's for a cocktail and change into our nice, dinner clothes.
He thought it was a great idea, too, so we made the plan.
The evening arrived, and it was a nice one. We dropped in on Jeff.
While we were having our martini, we were talking of food (of course), and I told him of that first day working for him, making the beef broth. I told him I had, as promised, never deviated from his procedure, and had, in fact, gone on to teach it the very same way to countless other young cooks, some of whom have gone on to run kitchens of their own, and are teaching it to other young cooks, and here I am: one, in a long chain of cooks, passing down the foundational secret.
Jeff responded by getting choked up (as he was fabulously prone to do) and said, "Let me tell you about the guy who taught me how to make beef stock," and told me of the fellow who ran Tacoma's LH Bates Vocational College's Culinary Arts program, which was highly-regarded then, and still is.
A long chain of cooks.
Beef stock, the way I make it
My wife was advised by an acupuncturist to have beef broth for her pulmonary complaint. "It's easy," she said, "You just get a beef bone and boil it in some water." When I was through cringing, I told her I had a different approach. Here it is.
You'll need a large kettle - at least four gallons - for this procedure. If you have nothing that size, use the largest you have and scale the recipe accordingly. Start out with about two gallons of good water in the pot - I use filtered water; it's worth it, even if you have to buy jugs of water, to use the best water you can, since you'll be boiling it down. You'll need about three gallons of water to make a gallon of broth.
Start with about ten pounds of beef bones - just buy the sliced leg bones, usually labled as being for dogs. Meaty neck bones are also nice, but the leg bones contribute more to the body, so make sure and have some, at least half. If the bones are really chunky, ask the butcher to cut them with the saw. Ideally, the bones are splintered into chunks, but don't get carried away. Whatever you have is fine, as long as you have enough.
You'll also need mirepoix, which is a standard component in the French kitchen: celery, onions, and carrots. If they are to appear in a sauce, they are diced, but in this case, they can be cut as coarse or as fine as you like. I slice everything small, usually using about four large carrots, five or six stalks of celery, and two or three onions (reserve the peels).
If you've been prudent and frugal, you'll have been saving scraps of these vegetables, as well as herb stems, in a bag in the freezer, in anticipation of this day. Not much I like better than being able to pull green leek parts out of the freezer for the beef broth pot.
Arrange the bones in a roasting pan, or in two or more 9x13 cake pans; you'll need the high sides later. Put them in a 400° oven for a couple of hours, turning them once or twice to brown them evenly. Be careful when you slide the pan out to turn the bones - lots of fat will have been rendered off, and that day when I was making it with Jeff, some of the hot fat sloshed over the lip of the pan and onto my palm and burnt the crap out of it.
After the bones are nicely browned, add the mirepoix, stirring it among the fat that's been rendered, and spreading it out over all the bones, and roast that, too, for an hour or more, until the vegetables are also well-browned. Check in on them once or twice and turn them, too. If anything gets a bit burnt, that's fine. Contributes to the flavor and color.
 When everything is nice and roasted, take the bones out and set them in the pot, into which you've placed the two gallons of good water, and under which you've turned the heat to high, to bring it close to boiling as the roasting came to an end.
Use a utensil to transfer the bones, taking your time. I prefer tongs, but a large spoon would do, or even a pancake-turner. But you don't want to dump them in the water, as it's messy, and there's all that hot fat in the pan. So set them in, and now that the pan is empty, it's your chance to pour off the fat. If you're unable to safely remove it at this stage, though, don't worry: you'll have a number of other opportunities.
Don't set the roasting pans in the sink - you want to extract that flavor from the bits that are roasted on, so put about half an inch of water in each pan and return them to the oven for about ten minutes. This is deglazing, an important step.
Meanwhile, you'll have the bones and mirepoix coming to a boil; this is the best time to skim the broth to remove the scum that it will throw. You'll want a nice, clarified stock, so it's best to work at that from the beginning.
After the pans have roasted with water, pull them out and scrape off the bits with a spoon - when I finish deglazing a pan, it barely needs more than a wipe to get clean; all the roasted on bits have been dislodged, helped along by the hot water. It all goes into the pot.
When the pot comes to a boil, lower the heat so you have merely a simmer - if you remove the fat at this stage with a ladle or a baster, you'll see barely more than a ten centimeter disc of clear broth at the top, when bits are thrown clear of it by the gentle simmering action - an indication of the appropriate fire.
And keep that fire on it for hours - from six or eight (not enough, in my opinion) to twenty-four or even thirty-six hours. I usually run mine for at least twenty-four hours, not a lot longer than that. You'll need to top it up, and keep the fire on it at night - but if you can't, just let it sit, cooled, on the stovetop overnight. You can resume the simmering in the morning, and you'll be safe.
During the boil, throw in the onion skins, and several cloves of garlic, unpeeled but gently smashed (the onion and garlic peels contribute to a dark color). Toss in a bayleaf or two - I like to use them freshly-dried (not too fresh; the flavor is too coarse until they've been dried), so I snag sprigs when I see a nice shrub, I don't care whose shrub it is. Add some peppercorns, whole, a dozen or so. You can add a bit of salt, but go easy - you might be concentrating the stock by boiling it down, and you don't want it to be too salty - a little salt enables better clarity, though, so add half a teaspoon or so - Celtic salt, if you have it, in which half the periodic table is represented.
Add some sprigs of thyme, but avoid sage or rosemary - too strong, and they'll limit what you can do with your broth - you want it on the baseline side.
And of course, parsley - you can never throw in too much parsley.
Keep that gentle simmer going, stir it now and then.
Once the simmering is done, it's time for the tricky part of straining it. If you're well-prepared, you have a large strainer or two (I have one with mesh so fine it appears merely translucent to my aged eyes, called a chinois, or "Chinese hat.") - if so, set that over a pot or bowl large enough to handle the two gallons of broth you'll have, and gently pour the broth through, watching that the bones don't tumble out in a messy pile. If you like, you can remove them as carefully as you set them in the first place, and then strain the broth.
If you don't have another large pot or bowl to strain into, then carefully remove the bones and mushy vegetables, and strain into the largest bowls you have, filling as many as it takes. You can also do this if your strainer is on the small side. However you do it, don't fuss over it. DO try to eliminate any solids, but you'll still have a chance to catch any that slip through.
Now, you can either bottle it up and store it in the fridge, or you can reduce it by boiling and then store it - better to do the latter.
Put the pot on the stove and bring it to a boil - if you like, start the boil out slow, and keep the pot off to the side of the flame, so any impurities that made it through can be skimmed off to the side and removed.
Once you've done that, bring it to a boil and boil away. It's a good idea to keep the largest whisk you have close by, and even set in cold water - if the pot begins to boil over, you can just plunge the whisk in it, which cools it below the boiling point rapidly, giving you time to turn the burner down and not freak out.
I boil it down by half, ending up with four quarts of broth from my original two gallons of water and ten pounds of bones.
And I pour it, when it's all done, through a fine strainer, fresh off the boil, into clean, quart mason jars, and screw the lids on right away (be careful to wipe the rim if you mess it up, but be clean about it). I label the lid with the date on masking tape and stick it in the refrigerator right away; although you won't find this recommended in a USDA pamphlet, and should hold me blameless if you use my method, I have never had broth rot if bottled this way and kept in the refrigerator. I have kept broth for over a year this way, and no spoilage.
However, as soon as you open that bottle to use some broth, which should be nice and congealed, too, if you had favorable bones, it will begin to spoil. Once I open a bottle of it, I either use it within three days, or bring it to a boil and put it in a clean, smaller jar and put it away promptly. Keeps indefinitely, again.
You can open the bottles after they've chilled to take off the layer of fat - this is how stocks are routinely defatted, by chilling them and lifting off the congealed fat from the surface - but it contributes to the air seal, so don't worry about it until you're ready to use it.
I have seen many references that suggest the easiest way to store broth is to freeze it in ice-cube trays, and keep them in a bag, but the freezer is the worst place to store stock, as it's a harsh-flavor environment - nothing emerges from the freezer with its flavor intact, and in the case of this rather robust, but really demure and gentle beef broth, you don't want to treat it that way. Keep it in jars, fresh, in the refrigerator, and be sure to pasteurize it if you open it.[3]
Don't assume you can do chicken stock the same way; it's completely different, and fish stock is different from that. All are critical foundations, and I have procedures for them all. I'll get to them…
[1] I used to walk through the market early in the morning, having gotten off the bus from North Seattle - that was when it was at its best, in the winter, puddles everywhere, the smell of fresh fish, hand trucks, cigarette smoke, activity - behind the scenes, at its best.
[2] My favorite was Jim Whittaker, the first American on the summit of Everest, and a boyhood hero.
[3]160°F /72°C for thirty seconds to pasteurize. Boil it if you like.
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