Is Stock Wasteful?

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At Wal-Mart (and other stores), they sell a 10 pound bag of leg quarters for 0.49 per pound, so $4.90 per bag. I’ve seen this same bag go on sale for 0.39 per pound during a holiday weekend (read that as time to grill) making it a $3.90 bag. I’ve yet to see them drop to 0.29 per pound.

There’s nothing wrong with this chicken either. It’s fine. The pieces are huge, but the occasional one is mangled from a bad cut. These are the leg quarters that are left over after the bird is butchered for it’s breasts and wings. I buy these on occasion and then split them into individual bags and freeze them.
 
In a properly made stock there is very little, if any, nutritional value or flavor left in the ingredients you used to made the stock. So, no - making stock is not necessarily wasteful, especially since it is normally made with scraps and bones that are not readily eaten anyway. When you start adding meat, and depending on how much you use (in proportion to the liquid) and how much you reduce it, you elevate it to the status of broth, bouillon or consommé - although these can also be technically classified as stocks.

As for those cheap 10/lb bags of leg quarters - we can get therm down here in TX, too. The price depends on the store and if they are on sale or not - there was a store close to me that used to put them on sale for 0.19/lb every 2-3 months - but since I've moved it wouldn't be worth the $5-$10 in gas to go over there. And, yes, they make great broth and stock since the dark meat has more flavor and collagen than the breasts. And I can made several dishes from them for really cheap!
 
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I am not sure what wasteful in stock making means.

But we make stock all the time.

After we have made a roasted chicken or better yet, turkey, we make stock. Then we make soup, usually. And it takes some veggies that we toss at the end, they really are spent.

Wnen we make a beef stock we take bones and go throught the bone and mirepoix thing with some added stuff. Then we take a a cheap cup of beef and cut it into pieces. We then sear them and until they are a brown, and leave a lovely fond on the SS pan. Then we add mirepoix, sometimes roasted, and the stock and do the gentle heating all over again.

It takes a while but the result is fantastic.

At the end the meat is totally spent, it has no flavor at all. Will sometimes, depending upon how hungry I am, toss some on a roll and slather with jarred BBQ sauce. It is OK, but there sure ain't no beef flavor left in the meat.

There is certainly protein in the remaining flavorless exhausted meat, which I guess we waste. But I use the stock to make dynamite demi glace and sauces. And so I consider the expense worth it.

We are very frugal. But do we use every bit of protein or nutriment available to us?

Not at all.

And I am glad we do not have to.
 
I don't believe in wasting food, either. My mother lived through the Depression and my dad had a German grandmother that knew how to cook 'possum. I've never gone that far and never will. But my opinion is, Uncle Sam might be taxing us out the wazoo on what we are paid, the city & state might be taxing us on everything we buy. But NO ONE has figured out how to tax us on the money that we SAVE by being frugal.

When I make stock, I put a whole chicken -- nothing else -- in the crockpot and leave it on low all night. In the morning I pour off the broth, put it in the refrigerator, and bone the chicken. The dark meat is used in a casserole, with pasta, vegetables and a cream soup -- maybe some cheese, top with cracker crumbs or tater tots or what have you. The light meat is used to make a nice chicken spread for sandwiches or a chicken salad. The bones, fat and gristle go back into the crock-pot. Essentially what I am doing is getting three meals out of that one chicken -- the casserole, the sandwiches or salad, and the soup.

I always keep a "stock container" in my freezer. When I have little tads of vegetables, or sometimes just the broth from, say, green beans, all this goes into my freezer container. Add outside leaves of cabbage, leaves of celery, the bottom stalks from cauliflower & broccoli -- just anything in your day-to-day cooking that might contribute to good stock. Steer away from corn and potatoes though. The corn makes the broth too sweet and the flavor and consistency of potatoes changes with freezing. I also do not like to use the peels of carrots because I find them bitter. But anyway, when I put the bones back into the crock pot, I add as many of these containers as the crock pot will hold. Sometimes I will add a chopped onion and some chopped carrot and maybe a block of my home-grown shredded zucchini and some garlic if it's lacking in my freezer containers. If I want to make a big batch, I use my big electric roaster instead of a crock pot. Put this on low and let it simmer all day and all that night. By morning, the bones of that chicken will be so soft you can crush them between your fingers. Pour the liquid off, then pour a small amount of water back into the pot, and stir it around, to "rinse" the solids. You'll be surprised how much flavor is still clinging to the solids. Drain this off. Combine your first, second and third broths. The solids can be safely fed to the dog or cat if you mash the bones first. They love it. I'm not a nutritionist, but I'm guessing there's still a LITTLE nutrition left in it.

Now, if you're making just vegetable broth, and you are not using things like onion tops, you can actually use the solids in a zucchini bread or pumpkin bread recipe, using the solids instead of the zucchini or pumpkin. Or you can prepare a little pasta and add it to that with an 8-oz can of tomato sauce.
 
I'd say depending on what you use your chickens for, and what you use your stock for, it might be wasteful. I noticed that several of you use whole chickens in your stocks, for example, and to me, that would be wasteful. This is because I am unlike many of you in the regards that I don't ever use my stocks as soup bases. I reduce them to glace consistency, and use it for sauces, or sometimes simply to enrich a side dish- like adding chicken glace to cornbread dressing that I might serve with a roasted chicken breast, or simply add it to enrich a soup, rather than it serving as the base. Something I've done before is to enrich a roasted butterneut squash soup with chicken glace.

For my purposes, having meat on my bones is undesirable, because it puts a dent in the quality of my final glace. The proteins found in meat simply break down and cloud my stock, and then soak up that valuable liquid that just gets thrown away when I strain. By keeping meat off the bones, I ensure higher yield and better clarity.

Broths typically are made with meat, because they offer good flavor without needing to be reduced first.

At the restaurant, we try to use as much of the animal as we can. Our ducks are a great example of making food go far. We remove the breasts, trim the fleshy underside, and then score the skin and save these for use in our duck breast entree: one duck breast grabs us $18. Already we've made back the cost of our duck. The legs are removed and trimmed of excess skin and fat and the cured and confit'd. One leg of duck confit grabs us $9 ( i think). So there you have 2x $9 plus 2x $18 for a grand total of $52 from one duck. The rest of the duck doesn't get sold, but it does get used. We save our duck livers for later use in pate's, which we occasionally make for VIP customers or special events. We trim ALL of the skin and fat from the duck body, and throw it into a large pot and then cover with water, and cook it at a bare simmer for about 4 hours. We strain the skin out and chill the liquid, allowing the fat to rise to the top. We skim this fat, and this is the fat we use to confit our duck legs. Sometimes we even use the remaining "duck water" which carries some flavor, to enrich soups or sauces. Finally, we roast the bones, backs, necks, wings, ribs, and use that to make duck stock. The stock gets reduced into glace consistency which we finish a la minute in the pan we use to sear our duck breast, finished with a little whiskey and the peppercorn melange we use to season our duck. The result is a great entree, Crispy 5-peppercorn duck breast (cooked to MR) with a great whiskey sauce.

Our chicken go through much the same process.
 
I use chicken necks to make it but I LOVE to eat the necks after as well...no wastage there. The carrot and potato as well gets eaten.

But even if I didn't eat it, I would still make it. Tastes good :)
 
Anyone price a can of broth recently? I didn't realize that I must have been gagging in the aisle at the prices when an elderly gentleman turned around and gave me a funny look. And canned broth doesn't taste nearly as great as the homemade stuff. In Kazakhstan, you either make your own broth or too bad.......there is no grocery store to run to....... that's why there are beautiful bags of chicken and beef bones to buy that cost zip. I don't know what the return is on nutrients but on flavor and cost to make issues.......priceless
 
expatty, that guy in the store? the old guy? he spent his life making stock after stock and never was able to experience life's pleasure's of travel, dining out, etcetera, in the long years alotted him. his dismay was that of your objection to both the cost of his life's work, and regret for not having canned stock available when he could have used it.

:bounce::w00t2:
 
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I subscribe to the Keltin principle here too. I keep a large container for my veg trimmings in the fridge and in go celery and carrot ends, onion ends etc for use in stock. Bones I store in zip lock bags. If I'm not making stock this week...into the freezer...but I make soup every couple weeks and have use for stock in many other applications. I also have a stock container which I pour opened unused portions of canned stocks for use during the week if I have no home made. I hate to waste food and will find a way to use it if possible. I have cut way down on spoilage by buying very fresh and having a really good fridge too!
 
I rarely have time to prepare stock so I normally use chicken/clam base.
 
My useless opinion here is that making stock from leftover bones is the ABSOLUTE opposite of waste!!!
You paid 5 bucks for a 5 lb chicken. I feed 5 people (ok 3 are small) 2x on just the meat. If I make stock I dont buy it at $1 a can. I save up 2-3 chickens worth of bones, voila!! 2 months worth (if I dont make soup) of chicken stock.
 
Well, when you can't buy canned beef or chicken stock and you've been firmly instructed to watch you sodium intake you learn quickly to make your own and regulate the amount of salt in it and not rely on tasteless sodium laden boullion cubes (which IMHO are only good in a push to shove pinch). Mike in FW has a wonderful recipe for beef stock (roast the bones first---wonderful!! post is on here somewhere) and for chicken stock freeze all your chicken parts and bones and then make it....so cheap and delicious .....yum!)
 

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