dragonlady7

love and hate foodies

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Just saw a cooking youtuber specify to only add one small bayleaf to a pot of veggie stock, or else it will overpower everything else and I mean this in the most non throwing shade way possible because I know everybody’s tastes are different and I myself have weird taste in a lot of things, but ma’am, this it’s bayleaf, it couldn’t even overpower a glass of hot water if you tried to make tea with it.

It makes me think about how many recipes and cooking ppl make sure you know you have to do something this exact way and no different, or horrible things will happen and then the horrible things are like, either 100% down to taste, or 10% off from the optimum and often at a point way past diminishing returns. Staying with the example of veggie stock, the amount of people you see who are like “no, never simmer it for more than an hour, it’ll lose all it’s flavour” when in reality it’s just like… it’s veggie stock, don’t overthink it. “Use only fresh ingredients so the stock retains the most fresh purity of flavour, don’t use peels, they will make it brown, don’t add potatoes, they will ruin the clarity of it” vs “use anything you have, freeze your scraps, use old, floppy carrots you wouldn’t give your worst enemies anymore, anything that isn’t full of mold is perfect”. It’s veggie stock. It’s not a meat vs bone thing like left over chicken carcasses bc whole chickens. It’s vegetables and you cook them until they make your water sweet, of course it’s nice to know in advance that onion peels will make it brown and potatoes will make it cloudy, but to present that as therefore being wrong is like… it feels like gentrification. The only real rule is don’t add things that will make it taste bad when you simmer them for an hour. The other real rule is add any dried mushrooms you still have lying around if you wanna live like a king. No it won’t taste like mushroom stock, but it’ll pump it full of roasting flavours and glutamate. This isn’t about the person I mentioned in the OP anymore btw, it’s just me going off on a tangent.

“Never add onion peels because color is implicitly important and if your stock is dark, you made it badly” is like the flip side of the coin of that clean living youtuber I talked about once before who went on about the differences between pickling and fermenting pickles and went elbow deep into all the health benefits of fermenting but didn’t say a single word about how they work differently as food. What they taste like, what the texture is like.

I don’t care how good fermented pickles are, I don’t care how horribly brown onion peels make my stock, like, no, I do, it’s nice to know, but I’m just a hungry guy who wants to know what my food will be like to eat if I do it this way instead of that and how I can be smart about preparing it.

So thank you bayleaf lady, while I disagree that bayleafs do anything other than add a tiny bit of herb to other flavours, you are actually talking about how to make stock taste good.

I have a bag in the freezer full of ends of celery and butts of onions and stuff, I just throw the ends of onions and carrots into it and when it’s really full I’ll simmer it for an hour or so and sieve the limp veggies out and it makes really good

veggie stock.

Yeah, just don’t overthink it.

Is that not the original point of veggie stock? Or chicken stock or etc? Squeeze some more food out of those foods before discarding?

oh man this is like square in my current preoccupation. (wait we DON’T want stock to be brown?? but onions… tasty?? and stock is usually brown?? what color are you expecting?????)

I work on a farm. We have our own slaughterhouse for poultry and we just added a small commercial kitchen. We always cut up a bunch of the chickens to sell as parts, lots of people don’t want whole chickens; we’ve always saved the necks/backs/tails/extra skin/wingtips in a “soup pack” to sell cheap to people who want to make their own broth.

So one of the first things we did in the commercial kitchen was just– cut down on bulk in our freezers by just throwing those parts into a giant-ass stock pot and simmering it and then packaging and freezing the broth instead, to sell also cheap to people who just want broth.

And we had a chef helping us cut up the chickens, and he was giving us all these like “oh for best results do X and Y” and all of them were so complicated. That’s not how I make stock. Ideally I’d like to roast the carcasses first but if I don’t, what difference does it make? We want to sell this broth cheap and if I’ve got to spend three to five days making it (with repeated instances of needing someone to help me put the giant fucking pot into the fridge etc between steps because I can’t lift a 20-gallon stockpot on my own and you know I’m starting this on processing day so I’m already fucking exhausted) before I can even package it, then we have to charge more. What are people expecting from chicken stock? Is it okay that it’s cloudy because I didn’t keep it to a low simmer? This burner is so powerful that it rolls the fuck outta the boil even in my stock pot that’s got 45 fucking carcasses in it, i can’t turn it down any farther.

I’m just doing what I’d do for my own personal use here– chickens, water, just enough salt that it’s food, boil it until it falls apart, strain it, freeze it in servings. is this not what people would expect when they get broth?? It’s collagen-y as fuck, it’s got yellow fat on top and I’m careful to make sure every serving’s got an equal amount of that, it’s mostly got the solids removed– do I need to be more elaborate??

I mean, for my own personal use I save the bones from every meat I eat (bones and gristle and fat <3) and the ends from every non-brassica vegetable I eat (carrot tops my beloved) and pressure-cook it, but the same basic rule applies that I just cook it until its done and then strain out the grit and go from there? Do I need to be fancier???

Am I overthinking this. Maybe I’ll write “homestyle” on the label. No, I’m not adding spices, this is not a prepared food this is a base and I don’t know if people have allergies so I’m not adding anything! I just want this to be culinarily neutral, y’know??? and i want people who don’t have four hours and a giant stockpot to be able to get some of this collagen in their lives!

But I don’t want it to suck. I want it to be decent. (Your picture was not posted)