I finally got it. Stock was there to make things taste more interesting.
The issue had been holding me back. You see, I have that kind of mind that siezes up when a question needs answering. If I see no answer to my question, I simply keep asking it. This might be okay if I thought out loud.
So when our “Culinary Foundations I” professor Chef Patricio continued to mention stock as an ingredient for soups and sauces, but did not give me the fundemental reasoning as to why, I am certain I missed material.
In fact, when I think back to Culinary Foundations I, our first segment of culinary school, I remember very little. I remember the first day, when Chef told me I needed to shave. I remember the second day, when I came back not only with a bare chin but a bare shiny head as well, a resolute plan to show the authority figure that I was quite serious about his class. But following those early days, when Chef went over our school-issued toolkits and showed us the simplest of knife cuts, I can remember little more than talk of stock.
Chef started with bones, veal bones. It was at this early stage that I lost the first grips of relateability. Who eats veal? Who eats veal in enough quantity so as to end up with four pounds of bones, as the recipe calls for? Hell, I didn’t even eat that much chicken!
Then I was further thrown into a place I did not want to be, a place including tomato paste. This was a product I had never heard of, but it sounded expensive.
It is hard to explain the difficulty I have putting myself back into the mental state from two years ago. Every ingredient seemed like a volitile chemical from science class. They were colorful masses of stuff that recipes told me would come together to make a dish. Like most Americans, and arguably, much of the world, I was horribly uneducated as to the “why” of ingredients.
But that’s why we go to cooking school.
I didn’t know how much I didn’t know. I had no idea that rules of flavor, things like the sweetness balancing salty, and acidity balancing fat, would become so second nature that I would forget how foreign the concept had begun.
So tomato paste went in with the bones. I know now that tomato paste is a cool addition to roasted veal bones for use in stock, it helping to draw gelatin out of the bones. More often than not, people that cook are making veal stock not to use as stock, but to reduce, boiling the mixture and forcing the water to evaporate into steam, while the solids that taste good, are left behind. This creates something the french call “demi-glace”. It’s got a little water, a lot of flavor, and a butt-load of gelatin. It looks and acts like jello. It is jello, really, only veal flavored.
But that was my problem. Cooking has so much going on, and so many different options and elements, there is no way to get a scope of what you must learn to know it all. And as soon as you learn an ingredient exists, you also learn that you don’t know how it tastes raw. You don’t know how it tastes boiled, or fried, or sauted. You don’t know how it tastes infused in an oil, or pickled with vinegar. You don’t know how it will taste in a salad, or salted, left for an hour, then washed. There is so little you know.
And even when you’ve tasted each ingredient in each possible configuration you still cannot really say that you know it. Not in every finger of either hand. Not in your ears, where things will whisper to you that they are ready, as long as you know to listen. Not in your nose, where a memory of the scent of diced onions when they are perfectly sauted in butter will immediately signal your brain to take them off the heat. And not really in your taste buds. That comes from eating the ingredient at every stage in the cooking process so many times that you begin to simply expect the changes. That comes from having to throw out your dish and start again because your grade and the respect of your Chef instructor depends on it.
No, I had no idea, at that early stage, that cooking school consisted of more than just copying down recipes and guarding them like a secret diary. At some point towards the end of that first class, however, when I had roasted bones and brushed tomato paste on them. At some point after I had filled a gigantic pot with water and dumped the bones in. At some point after the five-hundredth cup-full of scum, naturally occuring impurities that rise to the top of any stock and demand to be removed. At some point after all this, I took a spoonful of the dark, slimy, hot liquid. It tasted very much like soup, or a stew made for the low sodium diet. And it was at this moment that I finally began to comprehend that stock was in soups, and sauces, and braising liquid purely because it had more flavor than water.
And that was it. Six weeks of culinary training shortened into one single sentence and thought. The six weeks were worth it. For now I understood.
Stock just tastes better than water.
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