Day Six - Making Broth from Stock

courtesy of

Shocking truth: Stock and broth are not the same!

Second day in the kitchen. Today is better then yesterday, we have less lecture and spend more time in the kitchen. For now the main problem we (as a group) have is that everyone wants to do everything. Taking into consideration that the resources do not allow everyone to make stock and also because we have to know how to work in team this is the biggest challenge for now - learn how to work together. Our group is not unique in this, I believe this is common at the beginning for everyone. So this is not a surprise for our chef and he knows how to handle this.

From now on our days in the kitchen will be divided between group tasks and individual tasks.

Our group task for today was to prepare broth. I thought between stock and broth are the same. It appears they are not. Broth has higher content of main ingredient, quite often started with pre-cooked main ingredient (sear meat at the beginning) and many times served as is. You do not serve stock.

So, to make a good broth you will need:



3 pounds/ 1.36 kg meat with bones or poultry
5 quarts / 4.8 l stock (remember we did it yesterday - beef stock simmer for 8-10 hours?)
1 pound standard mirepoix
1 sachet d'Epics
Method is easy: combine meat and liquid, bring to simmer, simmer and skim  for the last hour of cooking add mirepoix and sachet, strain and it is ready to use.

For the meat broth cooking time is about two hours total, for chicken broth an hour and a half.
It smells really amazing. We stored our broth for the next week. Next week we will use it for our beef vegetable soup and it will be individual task, we will be evaluated on that task.

Also we made our first cut today. We had to cut one onion julienne (2'' x 1/8 '' x 1/8 ''), one onion small dice (1/4 '' x 1/4 '' square cubes) and minced garlic. Have to develop sense  of measurement, to be able feel inch, half inch, quater inch etc. For now it's OK to use ruler, but in the future I have to do it without ruller. Uniformity is really important, so if I and somebody else cut onion julienne it suppose to be same size.

Tomorrow we have four lectures for different topics, some of them are really excited (Math for kitchen professionals  and Product knowledge).