Turn a Winter of Kitchen Scraps Into Rich Stock With These

Stock is a four-hour simmer whether you make two quarts or eight, so the pot size decides whether the afternoon was worth it. Sixteen quarts swallows a chicken carcass, the week's vegetable bag and a gallon of water with room to skim - and come fall it doubles as the chili pot and the corn-boiling pot.

Heavy bottom or nothing; thin steel scorches the first onion skin.

Nobody makes stock from one dinner's scraps; the trick is the rolling freezer bag - onion ends, carrot peels, celery tops, herb stems, the chicken carcass - fed all week, emptied into the pot when full. Reusable silicone bags survive the wash-refill cycle for years where zip bags shred.

Skip brassicas and beet peels - cabbage sours a stock and beets dye it.

The first twenty minutes of a simmer throws grey foam, and stirred back in it makes stock cloudy and muddy-tasting. A wide spider skims it in three passes and later lifts spent solids so the pot pours light. It then spends the rest of the year fishing dumplings, blanched beans and fried things out of hot liquid.

Simmer, never boil - a rolling boil re-emulsifies everything you skimmed.

Poured through a colander, stock carries a sediment layer that clouds every soup after. A fine conical strainer catches what the colander cannot, and its shape funnels into a jar mouth without a spill. Line it with a coffee filter the one time a consommé matters.

Press the solids gently; wringing them clouds what you just clarified.

A gallon of stock frozen in one container is a gallon thawed every time a recipe wants a cup. Silicone cup-trays freeze it in portioned bricks that pop out and stack in a bag - a cup for the pan sauce, four for the soup, no thawing regret. The lids mean no freezer-smell lid of ice on top.

An ice-cube tray does the same for the concentrated demi-glace tier.