Restaurants are in the sweet spot of the economy of scale when it comes to things like sauces and stocks. Households can be a bit too small; making chicken stock is practical, but not effortless. Commercial processed food corporations on the other hand are too big; they can afford to formulate a witch’s brew of Flavoring 31A, Refined Extract Concentrate, and Butylated Hydroxysorbate that 9 out of 10 focus group participants agree reminds them of chicken stock. But restaurants have the manpower, facilities, and quantity of ingredients to make a lot of stocks and sauces from scratch and iterate on the recipe and process until it’s really good. (Once you get to about five chefs in the kitchen brigade you start to see the position of saucier, a chef whose job is just preparing sauces.) If the menu mentions soup, broth, stock, jus, or demi-glace I make a beeline for it and I’m usually in for a treat.
I'd argue that restaurants _don't_ have the manpower to do this. Restaurant margins are small as it is, and while I don't have concrete numbers to back this statement up, it feels like designating (or even hiring) someone to upcycle products like chicken bones into stock would be prohibitively expensive, in comparison to just buying prepackaged stock in bulk.
I don’t have concrete numbers either, so take this with a grain of salt (heh), but my experiences working with chefs is that it generally does make economic sense - and when it’s on the margin, most chefs also have a bit of professional pride that will tip the scales. Labour in the restaurant kitchen has an element of the “on-call” dynamic: you have to have enough hands in the kitchen to handle the peak (which generally lasts around 2 hours) but there’s downtime before and after the peak where they do prep work. Stock fits pretty neatly into ”start it before lunch service and finish it after dinner service”, for example.
One place I worked had buffalo wings on their snack menu, a fried chicken option on their burger menu, and chicken breast schnitzel as a main - the head chef’s costing showed the cheapest option was “process whole chickens: wings for the wings, deboned thighs for the burgers, deboned breasts for the schnitzel”. Put a 20 gallon pot instead of a garbage bin next to whoever’s processing the chickens and you get the meat for chicken stock for free. The wings, burgers, and schnitzels didn’t always sell at the same ratios so you’d sometimes have an excess of one of them from yesterday; that goes in the pot as well. The veggies don’t take long and the pot goes on a burner all day. Any chef walking by during lunch or dinner service skims the froth. When dinner service is winding up, pour it through a strainer to store. (Make sure you do this before the dishie is done for the evening so you can make them clean the pot.)
Because it was so integrated into other necessary processes, it was almost free, and they found a lot of uses for it.
Great comment! Made me really nostalgic for my restaurant days. 13 years before I got into tech and I still miss it sometimes whenever I have a great meal and can tell the staff is functioning as a solid unit.
Except that industrial stock is expensive compared to trimmings (free) and tastes terrible, and the cook assigned to make stock is also doing other tasks.
One thing that changed the dynamic for me was adding gelatin to store bought stock. I think I originally got that tip from Kenji (who was quoted in the article). If not it was definitely from Serious Eats.
It's nowhere near as good as the real deal, but it provides a great effort to value ratio.
Yeah the gelatin trick is huge. Store-bought stock/broth does a decent job of tasting like real chicken stock, and then the added gelatin does a decent job of feeling like real chicken stock.
It's as close to the real deal as it is probably worth to the home cook. I recently made a huge batch of beef stock and turkey stock over the same two days. After skimming the fat, all the filtering, heating and cooling, and portioning, then freezing, I hit me that while this stock is damn good, I had spent an absolute shitton of money, burned a bunch of fossil fuels, spent a bunch of electricity, and a lot of time, for a couple quarts of stock. A quart of kitchen basics low sodium and two packets of Knox gelatin get me 80% of the way there for fractions of the cost and time.
The trick is to freeze the stock in ice cube trays (the latex ones that make 2” cubes), and divide the spoils of your effort among a future dozen or so recipes. The marginal value of half a cup of homemade stock in a dish is typically massive.
These stocks are just yeast extract water for taste with chicken residues for marketing. Yeast extract (or MSG, or e621) is the cornerstone of modern processed food. It replaces expensive processes and products aimed at improving taste with a cheap additive that attempts to approximate the traditional taste. Soups, meat products, stocks, potato chips, snacks, sauces, anything that's supposed to have an extravagant taste is generally just a bland tasting cheap scalable filler product with yeast extract for flavor.
And consumers love it. They like the 'punch' of yeast extract flavor in everything. They love the low effort, low price products.
I despise yeast extract. It leaves a noticeable aftertaste in my mouth that won't go away for hours. I'd much prefer if brands just stuck with MSG but for some reason every single type of chips other than plain salt is adding yeast extract around here.
I suspect that the aftertaste is one of the selling features for brands: if you take a bite, enjoy it, and then an aftertaste tries to settle in, you might be likely to go for another bite to cover it up and repeat that until the product is gone and you want more.
Yeah, I'm not too fond of it, either. I recently found chips with paprika flavor that only had potato, salt, paprika powder! They tasted wonderful. A friend of mine thought them 'boring' and liked the common ones with yeast extract more.
You can achieve that effect with salt, msg and/or marmite (depending on what sort of flavour you're going for). Inversely, there's things you can achieve with actual stock that you can't with any of those, mostly related to the texture.
If you don't know what's going on, it can be quite dispiriting to read about restaurant-style sauces, learn that one of the key ingredients is stock, and then fail to replicate the effect because the stock you're getting isn't the real deal. These days I just make my own stock (it's dead easy) and freeze it in ice cube trays for easy portioning.
Yes, it is for most people. A minority of people don't like it though for a variety of reasons, mostly taste. But for them (more expensive), alternatives are available.
Yes, per the article -- the reason store-bought stock (minimum water-to-protein ratio 1:135) never reduces to a gelatin (like homemade) is that the homemade has Much higher protein content.
It's hard to know what other dimensions of healthiness apply to homemade over store bought.
> Yes, per the article -- the reason store-bought stock (minimum water-to-protein ratio 1:135) never reduces to a gelatin (like homemade) is that the homemade has Much higher protein content.
How much of an effect on my nutrition will replacing the stock part of my typical recipe with water have?
I'd be highly surprised if it were at all meaningful. I don't add stock for nutrition, I add it for the taste.
It's been 20 years since I've heard "mouth feel", based on some food projects going on in the lab where I did my PhD. I don't think it was a new term then. Maybe it's bled into the world of internet foodies recently, I have no idea, but it's not a new term
I get you but I believe mouth-feel is more than texture, for example it's the crunchiness of crisps in your mouth, and temperature alone doesn't cover the coolness of menthol.
I certainly agree with you that a lot of pretentious long words are taking over from short words that do a perfectly good job, and it sucks.
Though your mouth is reporting good feedback on things that seem to have good nutritional value right? Of course you can easily confuse it (eg with lots of sugar), I just mean the distinction you're making might not be needed.
Reason number 47,000,000,036 that governments worldwide should require total public disclosure of everything material to how anything sold to the public is made... including not just what ALL of the ingredients are, but their relative quantities, where they're sourced from, every detail of how they're processed, results of any quality or characterization tests, and any and all existing internal documentation of WHY any particular choices were made. If you're talking about machinery rather than food, then that includes all detailed design documents, source code, tooling designs and setups, and whatever else.
And of course they should refuse to enforce any NDA that bears on any of that.
Trade secrets are purely destructive, even from a "free market" perspective. Asymmetric information always makes markets less efficient. They should not be tolerated, let alone given any legal protection. You want to protect something, get a patent (which should still be harder to do than it is today).
Unfortunately it would require global coordination, because markets (and businesspeople) would punish the first mover, just as markets punish any individual player who doesn't play the secrecy game. So I'm not exactly holding my breath, especially because people in business are so used to playing in the secrecy system that they can't imagine competing any other way.
There should at least be a way for me to punch in a UPC or some other product code and see exactly where all of the ingredients came from. The author had to go through a lot of effort and hoops just to kinda sorta confirm that these brands are using concentrate and from one of three major players. I don't need to know ratios or recipes, just tell me who touched the shit in this carton.
> In 2004, the National Environmental Trust tested 40 common consumer products; in more than half of them they found toxic substances not listed on the product label
I've found a strategy that works well for home use: Freeze meat offcuts etc over time. Nuke accumulated stuff in pressure cooker every couple weeks, pour into a ice cube tray & freeze.
Especially useful for a flexitarian diet. The days where the main protein is say beans adding one of the above beef based cube helps give it a bit more complexity
I've normally found that you want to strain and cool it first, as otherwise you end up with a layer of fat in your stock, which tends to not be as nice.
What I do is cool down in the fridge over night, skim the solidified fat, and then freeze. I'll often get a portion of the skimmed stock and reduce it to a demi glace before freezing, often just to save space in the freezer, since I try to make at least a gallon at a time.
Yeah, that's generally my approach. Definitely don't freeze it in freezer bags though, as they stick together making it difficult to use it in the intended amounts.
I pull the layer of fat off the top after I cool down the chicken stock and it looks as rich and creamy as butter but with a slight chicken flavor. Some people call it schmaltz. It makes a great coating for a copper pan when cooking scrambled eggs or really anything pan fried.
With ready access to bones/carcasses (either direct from the store or from saving them when cooking) I've found making stock just-in-time via electric pressure cooker to be very convenient as the pressure cuts down the time so I don't need to make anything ahead and freeze, and it's legitimately I-can-leave-home levels of set-it-and-forget-it. The only part I haven't yet figured out is a more convenient way of straining out the bones. Currently I pour the contents into another stock pot with a pasta insert. This works, but is two additional large pieces to clean.
Buy a pasta straining spoon. It’s basically a large spoon with holes in it that replaces a full size pasta strainer. Is it better than a pasta strainer? No. Is it easier to clean, absolutely. I use mine all the time.
If I had to summarize what I thought of this article in one sentence I'd grab this quote:
""Raw material (chicken frames) are cooked in water to specific solids content,” the representative wrote.”
The the product, the rep and the company are so disconnected from reality that they can't even call a chicken bone a "chicken bone". They call it a "chicken frame", like some strange chicken nugget defecating robot.
Because it isn't just bone, there's a lot of skin and other connective tissue that goes along for the ride. I've parted out whole chickens so I wouldn't call me disconnected from the reality of it and calling it the frame makes perfect sense to me. "Carcass" is another word that's in common use.
This is going to be the case with any sufficiently scaled business. I feel the same way about how marketing and sales people talk about human beings as an opportunity to qualify for their sales funnel.
I'm sure others might feel similarly disgusted how software developers and business people talk about users. I personally find it gross that high spenders are commonly referred to as whales.
They sell demiglace in boxes and bags too about 10g per 100ml. If it's a matter of reduction of water, that'll make it 3x to 10x more expensive for the same amount of bones/carcass, if we use the 1-3g per 100 numbers in the article.
I was curious and went to check and this actually tracks based on Waitroses (UK) house brand stock and demiglace.
Their stock is 2.5g and 48p per 100ml and demiglace is 10g and £1.9 per 100ml, 4x the protein content and around 5x the price
> If manufacturers were truly making chicken stock “just like your grandma did,” it would be highly perishable, incredibly expensive, and shelf-unstable.
I wonder why grandma's chicken stock would not be shelf-stable using old or modern food-preservation techniques.
It is. We can it in mason jars at home. The fat floats to the top and solidifies, so even if the seal on the (sterilised!) jar is imperfect, the fat preserves the broth by preventing microbe incursion. Also helps to make it good and salty, and concentrate it down until it just begins (while boiling hot) to be viscous. When cool, it’s thick and gloopy.
So long as everything is good and hot when you seal, you’re good.
Quite often we’ll can it with a few legs in there - they taste fabulous after a year of marinading.
You can buy it in stores in France, no problem - or duck broth, or goose, or whatever you fancy.
> So long as everything is good and hot when you seal, you’re good.
Good, maybe. Safe, no. Chicken stock is not acidic enough even for water-bath canning – it must be pressure-canned. Anything else is a risk of botulism.
FYI, that fat layer is doing nothing to prevent microbial incursion and will turn rancid if left at room temperature not properly sealed. Proper home canning procedures should leave a good, sterile seal though (or just freeze it, which is what I do).
Here's a fairly simple stock recipe I've been making for a few years.
Usually I use saved chicken frames (the leftover bits from a whole chicken after cutting off the breasts and legs), but you can also get a whole chicken and cut it up into parts if you dont have anything saved. If you do use a mix with more meat, you can save the meat after making the stock for soups or salads.
For each 1 lb of chicken meat and bones you'll need:
1 quart water
1 carrot, cut into large pieces
1 celery stalk, cut into large pieces
1 garlic clove, crushed
½ onion, quartered
Herbs such as bay leaf, thyme, peppercorn
(parsley stems are a nice addition if you have some, dont add the leaves though)
Bring meat and bones to boil then reduce to a simmer, skimming froth. When clean enough, add everything else and continue simmer 2-8 hours (4 is good).
Strain, let cool a bit, portion into 1qt/1L containers, fridge overnight, skim fat once solidified. Can freeze up to 6 months.
I keep the bones, carcasses, and other bits and pieces left over from meals and freeze them in ziplocs. I'll also toss in the gelatinous goo and other drippings from roasting whole birds, wings, or thighs. (Sometimes this is ~1/2 the volume of the resulting stock).
When there's enough, or I'm running out of space in the freezer, I plop all of that into a 8 or 12 qt stockpot, with a couple carrots, an onion and a couple stalks of celery. Enough water to be mostly full. (If it's hard to fit the frozen bits, pour near-boiling water from a kettle over it to fill the pot).
Bring to a boil, back off to a light simmer, let it go for a few hours.
Skim off the bulk of the fat, (reserve or not, I had 1/2 L for 3.5L of stock yesterday) Pour it out through a colander into a large bowl to strain the chunks, skim most of the fat out and put it in quart jars for freezing. If stored in the fridge, it's basically solid.
If you need more meaty bits, roast some wings. They've got the best mix of meat and collagen for stock.
I just toss all the solids, the meat is mostly tasteless at that point, though the dog likes the carrots. (and occasional bits of the meat)
I have, rarely to be true, had too much carrot flavor direction in the stock, so I go light on carrots. I've never had that happen with the onion or celery. My whole family are garlic fiends so there's likely going to be garlic in the terminal recipes so I never add it to the stock.
I always start it at night after 8pm and do the coarse filtering with a basket and then 3 or 4x reduction[1] first thing the next morning. I put the hot coarsely filtered, reduced stock, including the fat, in a 1 gal plastic pitcher, filtering it again with a very fine mesh sieve, and stick it in the back of the fridge, uncovered. The next morning first thing I scoop off the hardened fat that caps the top of the stock[2], and then I plop[3] the stock into a 1 gal freezer bag, slowly ease out all the air, seal it and lay it flat on a cookie sheet. Usually it's around 1/2" to 3/4" thick. This means that once hard frozen, I can pull it out of the freezer on demand, let it sit flat on the counter for maybe 15 minutes, and then bend off as much or as little of mighty fine stock as I want. Consequently I use it all the time, and stock making is a required part of our family routine. I don't care how much time and effort it costs.
[1] I've got a 25 yo Viking gas range (with a big through roof fan hood); both the overnight barely bubbling simmer (using a generic stock pot) and the vigorous boil of the reduction, using a 6 quart All-Clad copper chef saute pan, seem hard to manage, as I do almost entirely hands off, on any consumer grade electric range I've ever used.
[2] After stupidly wasting too much of my lifespan I discovered what schmaltz is and now I use the stock fat for basically sauteeing any vegetables required in a recipe. I had always tossed the chicken skin in with all the other ingredients anyway!
[3] It had better plop! All this effort and it needs to be a solid gelatin object at the end.
Pressure cooking (including the time to bring up to pressure, pressure cooking, and pressure release) can save you about 2-6 of those hours. Depending on who you talk to, it's either almost as good or perhaps better than simmering for several hours.
Highly agree with this. I was gifted an electric pressure cooker recently, and it has been a revelation for home stock making. It makes truly excellent stock in around 60-90 minutes all up.
If you're willing to wait the extra half hour for a slow pressure release, then you get a beautiful super-clear consommé-style stock because the pressurized environment means the liquid never boils. I've never achieved that in a stock pot, even if i'm being finicky about temperature control.
Any time we do a grocery store / Costco chicken, I'll just throw all the bones into a pot with water, salt, and some carrot, celery and onions (or powder). I'll let it simmer for a few hours, and turn it off an hour before I plan to go to bed so it cools off before I put it in the fridge. It's really easy, and can be turned into delicious soup later in the week.
Eater is making an interesting choice with its cookie policy. It doesn't matter if you click Accept (the only option!) or not, it will still load the TikTok video, a platform that's well-known for its notorious tracking.
"By choosing I Accept, you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies."
Is Eater able to make an exception for TikTok in this context? At least for the news sites that I consume, they will typically overlay TikTok/Facebook/Instagram content with a form that asks you to reveal the said content in exchange for that platform getting data on you.
Here it looks like Eater just doesn't care at all.
Sorry for being so off-topic, but I just couldn't help to notice it.
I don't know. Between the pihole & content blocking plugins I didn't even notice it had any third party content. Combine that with the use of reader mode and all I got was a wall of text that made the site as pleasant as browsing the web in the 1990s from the CLI :)
And to be more on topic...I quite enjoyed this article, and wish more people would have this level of concern for & desire to know _the truth_.
I'll never understand the utility of autoplaying videos, especially ones that are barely related or more often completely unrelated (looking at you local and national news websites). Like, is this supposed to just annoy me? Is that annoyance going to make it more likely I'm going to stay on the site, which I'm blocking all the ads on anyways?
If you like venison, you'd probably enjoy it; it's somewhere between that and beef. It's commonly sold as mince, but like venison, it's quite lean, so you may have to adjust recipes a bit if you want to sub it in for ground beef. You can also get it in fillets and cook it like a steak.
It's perhaps a bit gamey, but I appreciated having it as an option while I was down-under. I'm allergic to beef, so it's more variety. Well prepared, it's just as good as any other red meat such as lamb.
I’m really not a fan of even long form reporting bringing the author into the story so much. It feels very much an artifact of this generation of reporters who seek celebrity as much as (more than?) telling an informative and neutral story.
I'm sure it has increased over time as people imitate their heroes, but first-person journalism is certainly not at all unique to "this generation"; it was already a big element of New Journalism in the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Journalism
Is it surprising that journalists who grow up reading Hunter Thompson go on to write like Hunter Thompson? I think that's a pretty natural progression, without needing to blame generational narcissism. If anything, it seems like World War II was the major turning point for involving the author into the story.
Hunter Thompson is who authors like this are trying to be, but his entire brand was shirking the establishment, not clout chasing. This reads like glorified livejournal.
Personally I felt more engaged with the story due to its narrative style.
A lot of the corporate responses wouldn't have as much impact if they were stated more neutrally like "These 3 stock manufacturers declined to comment", or just providing their nonanswers sequentially.
The author's bio also describes him as "chef, author and host of the YouTube cooking show Don’t Panic Pantry", so I think the style is more appropriate here than it would be written by a professional journalist on a more strictly "news" site.
I suppose it’s more “expected” given their background but I find it hard to give their research any credibility whatsoever. The informality of the writing style crosses well into the territory of “guys you’ll never guess what just happened to me.” Let me ask you this: how did this story actually benefit from being told from their perspective?
Here's another article summarizing the OC article [1].
It summarizes the details without any narrative, and concludes with:
> While he was mostly stone-walled, Galuten was able to confirm this from at least one major producer. A General Mills representative told him that the Progresso Chicken Broth recipe starts with a broth concentrate. Then they add in water and additional ingredients to create what you buy in the store. Or, Galuten, says “just buy literally any box of chicken stock because they are probably all the same.”
Frankly I don't find this as interesting as the original post.
I guess it seems more down to earth and less sterile than presenting the facts in a traditional "journalist" third person way.
Maybe I'm biased because I also write in this style for my own blog, but I frequently see this style used by hobbyists exploring technical topics on the front page of HN. E.g. a random post from the front page right now [2]
Interesting--I didn't know why the first ingredient is listed as broth--but the doom and gloom attitude was a bit much. E.g.:
```quote
As Moss pointed out, even the FDA-mandated nutrition facts box that has appeared on most packaged food since the ’90s “was conceived by none other than the food industry itself as a way of placating us.” Back in the ’70s, he explained, consumer advocate Ralph Nader was talking “really loudly and publicly about the evil-sounding” chemicals that the food industry was feeding to unknowing consumers. “As a way of countering that attack, [they figured] why don’t we disclose lots of stuff on the labels of packages and if we do so, people will feel comforted by the idea that the government is keeping track and it must be okay,” Moss said. “What I thought was our friend was in fact a conceit of the industry to lull us into complacency.”
```
Alternative read: activist makes a stink about a bad industry practice and industry self-regulates an effective response that helps the situation significantly. Is it perfect? Of course not, but my understanding is that the US has some of the strongest food labeling regulations in the world (similar to the EU's, much better than e.g. China) and they're being continuously tweaked to be better. As a consumer I can look at a food label and see basically everything that's in it that I care about, e.g. HFCS, and that means customer preferences drive company behavior. What this article sees as crass language about "good labeling" from the chicken concentrate manufacturers, I see as evidence that food labels work to change corporate behavior. If there were no food labeling laws who's to say that store-bought chicken stock would have any chicken in it at all?
Maybe I just have more of a stomach for industrial food production? I mean I make homemade stock and it's delicious and in a different league than anything from the store, but sometimes a meal needs some chicken water and you have nothing in the freezer, you know? It's not so bad. If we want to talk about store-bought crimes against the culinary arts let's talk about store-bought bread.
Yeah, the quotes from Moss had me rolling my eyes... shades of the guy at the coffee shop telling you how so-and-so invented a carburetor that ran on water, man, but GM had him killed.
Look, if you want to make a quick stock from store brought products, just add some bouillon and gelatin to it. If you want a bit more flavor and you have time, you can boil the crap out of some mirepoix and whatever bundled herbs you want to flavor it.
It's never going to be as good as the real thing, but then again, you're never going to eat the real thing by itself.
