Stock Market 101: Charred Edition
burn baby burn! stockpot inferno
This is Volume 4 of my Stock Market series, aiming to demystify the world of broth/stock and show you fun and easy ways to cook it up at home. We’ve covered Roasted Chicken Stock, Vegetable Stock, and Whole Chicken Stock - today we’re intentionally scorching our ingredients to show how a little charring can get you more bang for your buck in the kitchen.
Samin Nosrat, author of the fantastic Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat put it quite nicely:
Heat is the element of transformation. It triggers the changes that take our food from raw to cooked, runny to set, flabby to firm, flat to risen, and pale to golden brown. At the heart of good cooking lies good decision making, and the primary decision regarding heat is whether to cook food slowly over gentle heat or quickly over intense heat. Learn to use all of your senses—including common sense—to determine which level and source of heat to use.
Today we’ll start cooking food quickly over intense heat, and then simmer it slowly over gentle heat - best of both worlds! By deeply caramelizing the vegetables and aromatics, you intensify the taste, adding complexity and a subtle smoky note - and by slowly simmering them in water with salt and a few other ingredients, you coax out maximum flavour.
If you’ve ever made a pan sauce or a gravy, you know the best part comes from those delicious browned bits at the bottom of the pan. These are best achieved in a stainless steel pan or pot - skip the nonstick or dutch ovens here.
Today’s agenda:
a charred tomato stock
a charred asparagus dashi-sh
a mushroom pho with burnt aromatics
a burnt onion broth
a lapsang souchong broth
Charred Tomato Stock
I first came across the concept of a charred tomato stock on Kitty Coles’ Instagram ages ago. It’s an image I revisit frequently - just LOOK AT IT.
The opportunity escaped me last summer, and since winter tomatoes wouldn’t do it justice I decided to wait - so here we have it with some early summer tomatoes. Rather than go down the ginger and basil route, I went for 2 extra umami-boosters: anchovy paste and parmesan rinds. The resulting stock is intense and summery and delicious!
