Get bones, roast them
Okay, yes, there’s a whole chemical thing that happens when you roast the bones before throwing them into your stock pot. Start at 425º, 30m, check after 25m. The goal is to caramelize everything and get it nice & smoky first. The difference is significant.
Historically, I’ve done this in order to create a milder stock, but you can always go harder and make super flavorful stock. The difference, of course, is the amount of time you spend on it, as well as the ingredients that you throw into it. A bone-roasted stock with the usual suspects is going to have more flavor, and it’s also going to add an hour and cost you more.
None of you well-actually’d me about omitting the veggies in my meat stock, even though literally every French chef on the planet would have an aneurysm at the merest idea. This proves to me that you are all nerds who think Kenji is god, and you aren’t wrong, of course, but the goal with text is also to start simple, and if I start telling you about chemical reactions then goodness we have already lost the plot. Going into the chemistry is the “just simply colocate & manage a server” of food. I do that, and many of you do that, but people do not do that.
Anyway. Meat’s interesting. I eat meat, but not very much of it, and we should probably eat less of it in a profound general sense, for all of the reasons you already know. Meat should be a bit of a delicacy, or at base just another ingredient, and not the main focus. But it’s very easy to get bones in bulk on the cheap, because others eat meat, and they eat meat in a way that produces a surfeit of bones that are absolutely gonna get tossed if we don’t rescue ‘em. I once worked for a client that made barbeque ingredients, and after there was a downturn in the economy, I would interview customers who said they pulled back on supplies because meat was too expensive at the grocery store.
I’ve made Chinese food for a quarter century, and one thing you quickly learn when going over traditional recipes is just how little meat is in all of them. When meat is on the table, it’s usually alongside many vegetables. China developed as a heavily agrarian, rural society where meat was viewed as an extreme delicacy for almost all of its history. Ground meat was the norm. Occasional famines, and the mindset that they engendered in the populace, drove people to non-Western-standard species. Stock is used everywhere, because bones aren’t thrown away like they are here. A lot of regional street food is heavy on the veg & noodles, because much of it simply hasn’t changed over the years.
I say all of this because if we’re going to eat meat, we should probably reconsider the way in which we approach the animals we’re working with – and China, stretching every atom of the animal to its fullest extent, is a good inspiration to look to. Unlike many of the things you might have done in 2020 to, say, make your scallions last longer, I think that working with bones should be broadly normalized in our culture. Otherwise you’re wasting food – and you’re doing so with an animal, the ethics of which remain questionable at best. Roast your bones or don’t, but you absolutely should use them.
I forgot one other thing in my stock recipe. When you chill stock in your fridge, after a couple of days it will get fully down to temp, and any excess fat will harden in a layer on the top. You can and should skim that fat off, save it, and use it in future recipes. (Think: beef fat & potatoes, pork lard & collards, etc.) Every time I do so, I think about the animal, and say a small prayer of gratitude.