Winter, Johhny Cash and the Zen of Making Stock

I hate winter. It's too cold to enjoy the outdoors, the fish that I normally pursue have all either moved south or have retreated to deep water far offshore. Granted, living where I do I am (to a large extent) spared the worst that winter has to offer but, somehow, I find no comfort in this knowledge. I am subjected to worse than I would like to experience. What makes it even worse is the newcomers to our area who have fooled themselves into thinking that they have left the winter behind them and during those admittedly brief bitter cold snaps that we receive accost us with the statement "I thought it didn't get this cold here."


It does. It always has and, I suspect, it always will. Being forced to spend more and more time indoors, it becomes necessary to find other, less adventuresome ways to spend ones time. I cook, I write and I read. While these are all things I enjoy, being forced to spend more time reading carries with it certain inconveniences. For example, you will soon run out of books you know you will enjoy and are sometimes placed in the position of reaching way back among the shelves and grabbing that book that a well-meaning friend gave you to read but, you were hoping you would never have to. Such was the position I found myself in the other day when I reached for a book given to me as a gift with the words "I know you like to read and I know you like music so I saw this and thought you might like it."


NOTE: These words, or words very much like them, strike fear into the heart of the avid reader. As a group we are extraordinarily picky and the thought of trying to plow our way through a book picked out for us by someone else is greeted with the same warm enthusiasm with which we might greet the prospect of an impending tax audit.


That said, I was even less enthusiastic than that as I was convinced that the book in question would be impossibly boring. For, in this case, I can't stand the particular style of music (country) and this artist was one of my least favorite within that genre. I decided to give it a try as I find the process of crafting a song fascinating and besides, the nearest bookstore is almost 15 miles from my house and it was bitterly cold outside (26 degrees!).


The book is titled Cash and it is, of course, about Johnny Cash. In fact, it was written by the Man in Black himself, along with Patrick Carr. To my surprise, it is a very interesting read. It is my strong suspicion that Mr. Carrs contribution was more along the lines of taking random notes and tape recorded dictations from Johnny and putting them into a chronological and cohesive form. The book sounds like Johnny talking. I became so engrossed that I read for over an hour non-stop and got through about 80 pages. More importantly, I learned something; it is not necessary to like a persons music in order to like the person. I like Mr. Cash. I wish I could have known him.


This same day I had promised my family that I would make them some home-made Beef and Barley soup. Normally this would entail pulling a few quarts of stock from the freezer, slicing a few mushrooms (baby Portabellas, sometimes sold as Crimini mushrooms) dicing onions, garlic and carrots, searing off some beef already cut and trimmed for the purpose and firing up the stove. No big deal and wonderfully warming on a cold winters eve. Except this day. I had no stock in the freezer and would have to make some.


I make a lot of stock. Chicken stock, shrimp stock, vegetable stock and beef. During the cooler months my kitchen is redolent with the aroma of these stocks and other less common like court boullion or glace de veau, the classic French veal stock reduction. I discovered many years ago that the one thing that seperates the home kitchen from a good restaurant kitchen is stock. Soups, stews, gravies and sauces all benefit from being made with a truly rich and delicious stock. Having a few stocks on hand can elevate the most basic meals from simply good to wonderfully sublime. Stocks are one of my favorite things to make.


Fortunately, I had everything I needed to make a truly delicious beef stock. The super-mega mart had provided me with absolutely beautiful beef bones the day before. This, these days, can be the most difficult part of the process. Long gone are the days when the meat market at your grocer did any real meat cutting. Those days, you could ask for bones any day of the week and be assured that there would be at least a few available. After all, the store employed real butchers who actually cut meat all day long. There were bones-a-plenty. These days, you must be lucky enough to have in place a market manager with enough foresight to order bones at the same time he orders his meat. The actual butchering has been conveniently done for him buy a processing plant a couple of hundred miles away.



This day I had bones in hand and was ready to go. I lined a commercial half-sheet pan with foil and pre-heated the oven to 375 degrees. While the oven heated up (8 minutes on mine...every time) I spread 4 pounds of bones on the pan and gathered the rest of the stock ingredients. The classic mirepoix of French cuisine; 2 parts onion, 1 part celery, 1 part carrots all chopped, 6 cloves of garlic, bay leaves (please use the imported...California bay tastes too much like medicine) and thyme. I put the bones into the oven and began to prep my other ingredients in a wonderfully leisurely manner. Stock bones take a minimum of 2 1/2 hours to cook. You've got plenty of time.

With all this time on my hands, I totally immersed myself in the process of not only prepping the ingredients for the stock itself but also prepping those I would need for the soup. There were no distractions of any sort and it wasn't long before I was happily lost in the process. The only sounds disturbing the quiet of the house were the wondeful sounds made by the knife as it cut through the fresh, crisp vegetables and hit the old-fashioned wooden cutting board that I prefer for vegetables. I know most people wouldn't pay attention to these sounds but, to my ear, it is very nearly a music all its own. I peeled and chopped onions (save the skins...they add a nice color to the stock) carrots, celery and garlic for the stock and set them aside in small glass bowls I use just for that purpose. The French have assigned the term mise en place to this. To me...it's just common sense. From there, I prepped the ingredients for the soup itself. More onions, garlic and carrots were peeled and chopped. Mushrooms were cleaned, stemmed and sliced. More bowls were called into service, barley was measured out and set aside. The beef was pulled from the fridge, trimmed of excess fat and cut into bite size cubes.

All the while that this work was going on, the kitchen began to fill with the wondeful, beefy smell of those bones roasting away. Between the sounds and smells of the vegetables being prepped and the rich scent of roasting bones, I soon entered a state of complete relaxation and total comfort. These were the smells and sounds of home.

Promptly on schedule the bones were done. Now the stock must be put together. In days gone by, I would have put the accumulated beef fat from the marrow into my stockpot, added the vegetables and begun the process of sweating them in the beef fat. I have now reached the age where I try not to overburden my system with too much fat, no matter how tasty that fat might be. So I put some olive oil in instead (extra-virgin, if you please) added the veg and turned the burner to medium. When making a stock, you want to sweat the vegetables. We are after maximum flavor extraction here not color. I added kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper and cooked until the onions turned clear. Once this was done I added 1 cup of Cabernet Sauvignon and cooked until the liquid reduced by half. I then added the bones, 8 quarts of water, 4 bay leaves and about 1 tsp. of dried thyme. I left the burner on medium and walked away for 30 minutes. I opened a lovely bottle of Flying Dog Barleywine, put on my heavy coat and went outside. By the time I was thoroughlly chilled, the stock was boiling so I turned the heat down to a simmer and skimmed the foamy impurities (mostly coagulated proteins) off the stock. My work here was almost done and a day that began as nasty and cold had become warm and relaxing. Thanks to Johnny Cash and the Zen of making stock.