An Ode to Homemade Stock

By Daniel Duane

My enduring love affair with soup stock began at Christmastime in 2005, when my mother asked me to make dinner for 24 members of our extended family. I happened to be hooked on a cookbook by Thomas Keller called Bouchon—a collection of recipes from his French bistro in the Napa Valley—so I picked a recipe called Braised Beef with Red Wine, or Boeuf Bourguignon. Like most Keller recipes, it required the preparation of multiple subrecipes located on different pages of the book, including one for veal stock.

I had never made any stock other than basic chicken, so I dutifully flipped to page 318 and made a shopping list that included 10 pounds of veal bones, two calves’ feet, 16 ounces of tomato paste, a pound of leeks, two Spanish onions, two heads of garlic and a pound of tomatoes. It took a few phone calls to locate veal bones and calves’ feet, but I finally got the goods and, back home, settled into an astonishingly involved process that began with first putting the bones and feet into a giant pot with lots of cold water, bringing it all slowly to a simmer over the course of an hour, pouring off all that water and replacing it with fresh, clean water, bringing that water slowly to a simmer over the course of an hour, then adding all the other ingredients and simmering for another 4 hours while skimming constantly.

I won’t bore you with the details of the actual braised-beef recipe, except to say that it involved many more hours of work and an entire bottle of red wine, and that, on Christmas Day in my mother’s kitchen, as our family waited in the dining room, it filled exactly 24 soup bowls with falling-apart-tender short rib, brightly colored baby onions and carrots, and a clear dark broth. Having forgotten that I was guest number 25, I sent out the last of those bowls with the horrified realization that nothing remained but a single cup of that broth in my big stockpot. So I poured the hot brown liquid into a mug and, hiding in a corner to protect my aunts and uncles from the worry that I was going without, I began to drink.

Anybody who has ever tasted a classically prepared Bourguignon, or even just a real-deal French veal stock properly seasoned, knows the soul-melting satisfaction that shivered through my being that evening, as my tongue and mouth recognized a mysteriously profound nourishment. Forgive me when I tell you that it felt like a revelation of ineluctable truth about human physiology—sort of like what happens to long-time vegetarians when they eat bacon.

In the years since, stock-making has become part of my domestic routine, a pleasurable chore that, like tidying up, feels vital to my well-being. There have been times of excess, to be sure, like the years when I took to buying whole lambs and pigs from local farmers, butchering them on my kitchen table and turning their skeletons—plus entire pigs’ heads—into gallons upon gallons of lamb and pork stock, for the later preparation of endless soups and stews. There have been times of misguided obsession, too, like my pursuit of the ultimate ramen stock—inspired by David Chang’s Momofuku cookbook—and my conclusion that serious ramen is one of those dishes so absurdly time-consuming, and so relatively inexpensive to buy premade, that sanity dictates leaving it to the pros. There have even been times of deliberate minimalism, when the only stock I made was Japanese dashi, albeit with rare seaweeds from Hokkaido and dried/fermented/smoked bonito that I shaved into fine flakes with a purpose-built Japanese tool called a kezuriki—all in the interest of a deadly serious miso soup. Most of all, though, the enduring lesson of that Christmas Bourguignon has been the unshakable knowledge that, as long as I have good stock on hand, I can deliver deliciousness to the people I love.

DANIEL DUANE is a longtime contributor to Food & Wine, and the author of How to Cook Like a Man: A Memoir of Cookbook Obsession.