Stock Questions

Dealing with a recent glut of brown onions from the veg box scheme, I decided to make some French Onion Soup. That led me to re-consider the humble chicken stock.

One of the recipes for chicken stock I’ve been using includes in the recipe a stock cube (Knorr, says Nick Nairn in his book ‘Cook School’). That strikes me as oddly like saying that home-brewed beer would be helped by mixing it with Wadworth 6X or similar – you get the idea. So I began to wonder if I could get the same effect by simply making up a Knorr stock cube twice as concentrated as directed. That in itself led me to wonder if I could tell different stock cubes apart.

This is work in progress, but here is an observation. In the Channel4 series ‘ºCookery School’ it was suggested that an ideal level of seasoning equates to 1g salt dissolved in 100ml of water. That’s quite a lot, and not far off tasting of sea-water. I found that a Knorr stock cube (made as directed) tasted much the same, which is to say quite brackish. However, a Kallo organic chicken stock cube was much smoother on the palate: far more pleasing to my taste.

I’m off to make some more of my own stock now, having used the last of it in the onion soup. I’m tempted to make a cube-less version as per Joanna Farrow’s ‘Chef School’: I wonder how it’ll taste compared to the Kallo?