What is a stock?

Appears in
Dijo
Dijo

By Lesego Semenya

Published 2018

  • About
  • A stock is a flavoured liquid made from various primary ingredients. You get white stocks, brown stocks and fumets.
  • Examples of white stocks include poultry and vegetable stocks and take about an hour to make.
  • Brown stocks include beef, veal and lamb. They take about 6 hours to make and are the most commonly used type of stock – and the one chefs debate most about.
  • Fumets tend to be made from fish and are the quickest to make, as fish bones break up quickly and make the stock cloudy if cooked for too long.
  • Stock cubes are not stock, they’re flavoured cubes packed with flavouring (yes, some do have extracts of beef or chicken) and contain sodium, sometimes MSG and other things. I’m glad to see a trend of companies producing new stock pots of ‘liquid stock’ but, alas, these are also not true stocks.