Making pork stock at home

by Shawn Pillai

With the popularization of televised cooking programs 30 years ago, Americans began to undertake cooking high quality, stylish meals in the comfort of their own home. With the advent of the internet, cooking as a hobby has burgeoned into a common interest throughout the world. Currently, more people are beginning to experiment with professional, restaurant-style cooking at home. Increased interest in fine dining will surely revolutionize food culture in the United States in the years to come.
There are at least three distinguishable types of cooking. Convenience home cooking takes advantage of store-made ingredients. Since the majority of people don’t have the time to invest in cooking-from-scratch every day, convenience cooking occurs more frequently than any other type. Hobbyist cooking uses a wider range of skills and usually happens on weekends for cathartic purposes. Cooking hobbyists seek to relieve stress by treating cooking as an all-day activity. Hobbyists most often create their food from scratch and focus on producing high-quality, restaurant-style products at home for friends and family. Professional cooking combines the rapidity of convenience home cooking with the from-scratch, attention to detail attitude of the cooking hobbyist while adding an element of imminent injury and a level of stress that might make ER nurses sink to their knees.

Stuffed with information, YouTube channels and recipe websites are not in short supply. However, beginner cooking hobbyists are learning their skills slowly and deliberately, day-by-day, as they foray into new ingredients and experiment with the wide variety of cooking methods available. Often times, they make mistakes and are likely to have to start over.

There’s nothing wrong with mistakes. Learning through experience and making mistakes is absolutely critical in professional cooking. As my friend Chris Powers, a chef of 15 years currently lending his talents to Savage River Lodge, says, “I've made every mistake possible in this kitchen three times. And if I hadn't, I wouldn't be nearly as knowledgeable as I am today.”

The problem is that professional cooks have a distinct advantage. They’re cooking on someone else’s budget, and the time lost resulting from a mistake is often well worth the lesson. Most people cooking at home simply can’t spare the time or cash to learn by trial and error.

The solution, then, is placing more emphasis on the why of cooking, rather than just the how. Alton Brown of Food Network’s Good Eats embraces the why philosophy. Often referred to as “the Bill Nye of food,” Brown explains the science involved behind every step of the cooking process using graphs, charts, props, costumes, and numerous other things that help the viewer to understand complex topics more simply.

“If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day.” If I give someone a recipe listing the ingredients and the steps used to create the finished product, they may very well meet with success. However, if I turn that recipe into a lesson into why it is best to cook a certain way, they will be able to modify that recipe any way they please and one day may begin creating their own recipes from scratch.

Today, I will explore the process of making pork stock. Stock is a term for a wide variety of flavored liquids used in cooking. To qualify as animal stock, meat scraps and bones rich in collagen must be simmered in water to extract flavor. When heat is applied to collagen, it breaks down into water-soluble gelatin. Gelatin serves to thicken the liquid and give the stock body and texture. Mirepoix supplies the flavor base. Mirepoix refers to a mixture of two parts onion to one part celery and one part carrot, and is the foundation of flavor in all classic French cuisine. For the pork stock, I used two large white onions, five carrots, and seven stalks of celery. Ideally, aromatics should be used in making stock, but they aren't critical. Aromatics refer to the herbs used to flavor stock. Typically, thyme, rosemary, bay leaves, and parsley are used to flavor brown stocks. Additional aromatics such as garlic and peppercorns are also recommended.

At the grocery store, I asked the butcher if he had any spare pork bones and scraps that I could purchase. He didn't have bones, but he was happy to hand over a pound of pork scraps free of charge. I found veal bones to use as a substitute. Typically, corporate grocery stores will not always have bones available for purchase, but local butcher shops will have everything needed to make stock at home. For this stock, I used one pound of pork scraps and one pound of veal bones. To emphasize, the store-bought “stock” is not stock at all. Put in the time and effort and start from scratch.

To make any brown stock the meat, bones and vegetables should be roasted to develop color and flavor. Set the oven to its maximum temperature, usually around 500 °F. High heat serves to brown the outside of the products quickly via the Maillard reaction. In this case I'm not concerned with cooking the inside of the product by roasting, so using the oven’s highest heat setting is ideal. Place the meat and bones on a pan, taking care to space the items apart. Using a baking rack is optional, but I find that elevating the product away from the pan helps to circulate the heat more evenly. Roughly chop celery, carrot, and onion into two inch pieces and discard the stem ends. Stems contain dirt which can turn stock gritty. There’s no need to make these cuts aesthetically pleasing as they’ll be simmered and thrown in the trash after the flavor is extracted. As a side note, knife skills are critical in the culinary arts and should be studied and practiced regularly. Take care to remove the leaves from the celery before roasting. Leaves burn, which can leave the final product bitter. Toss the vegetables with olive oil (avoid extra virgin olive oil due to its low smoke point) or canola oil and place on a pan. Put both meat and vegetable pans into the oven.

When the vegetables are light brown, usually after about fifteen minutes, they are ready to go into the stockpot. Add a splash of oil to the pot. Add the vegetables and five crushed cloves of garlic. There’s no need to peel the garlic, as the liquid will be strained later. Deglaze the stockpot with two cups of red wine. Any red wine will lend itself nicely to brown stock, but I selected a lighter Pinot noir considering that pork, being a white meat, demands a lighter red wine. Alcohols are an important tool used to extract flavors from ingredients when cooking.

The meat and bones will take longer than the vegetables to cook. Every oven is different, so times vary from twenty minutes to an hour. The pork and veal bones should be very dark brown, but not black. If the product burns, the stock will turn bitter. When the pork and veal bones are dark brown, remove them from the oven and place into the stockpot. Be careful not to include any of the rendered fat when transferring. Animal fats produce a strong, undesirable taste in stock and should be skimmed off at the end of the entire process. Fats can also give stock a cloudy appearance.

Cover the bones with one inch of water and let the stock simmer on low heat for six hours. Low heat is important to maintain because if the stock is kept at a rolling boil, the fat will emulsify into the liquid. Creating an emulsion is desirable in many culinary situations (such as when making mayonnaise, hollandaise, or beurre blanc), but not when making stock.

When the stock is finished cooking, remove the solids with a spider or similar kitchen utensil. Strain the stock into a heat-safe vessel using a fine meshed sieve. In professional kitchens, any time a liquid or sauce is transferred between containers it is strained through a sieve lined with cheesecloth. To avoid temperature abuse, fill a sink with ice water and submerge the container at least half way. Legally, foods should not remain in the “danger zone”, between 41 °F and 135 °F, for more than two hours. Note that if a full pot of hot stock is placed into a typical home refrigerator, six hours later not only will the stock still be warm, but everything else in the refrigerator will be as well. After cooling below 41 degrees, the rendered fat will solidify on top of the stock and may be skimmed off easily. Stock may be portioned into freezer bags to be frozen and will keep up to three months.