The Trouble of Taking Stock

Dear Tamar,

I’m all about utilization, so the new—seemingly faddish—idea of using vegetable trims and peels to make vegetable stock has intrigued me. My first two attempts using curated bags of accumulated frozen bits have been more sow’s ear than silk purse. I am an experienced stock maker so my technique is solid. Is this a GIGO situation? Perhaps my usual direct deposit to the compost is a more utilitarian endeavor. Am I wasting time on waste?

-Taking Stock

Dear Taking Stock,

I didn’t know what GIGO meant. This wasn’t surprising. I only learned what GOAT meant last year, after asking my husband twice (the first time it was after I’d taken a sleeping pill. I promptly forgot and repeated the question the following morning.) I learned TL;DR a few months ago.

One interpretation of this cultural blindness is that I must live under a rock. A more charitable one is that I intentionally avoid discourses in which those abbreviations are used. And, of course, the two aren’t mutually exclusive—it may be that I’ve chosen my sheltering rock for its isolation. This is the truth. I have—not in objection to the abbreviations but in a more general objection to lingo. I hate it.

I didn’t know I hated lingo until I dated then married someone who worked in software. I disliked culinary lingo, but at Chez Panisse—where I used to work—everyone disliked culinary lingo. No one ever referred to vegetables as “veg,” or to running out of something as “86-ing.” Even the obligatory “Fire table X” always sounded, in a Chez Panisse cook’s mouth, self-aware and tongue-in-cheek. My now-husband, on the other hand, talked enthusiastically about sprints and iteration, about all-hands-on-decks, and one-on-ones, about walled gardens, and features and beta and deployment.

What I dislike about lingo is the way that it sneakily attempts to isolate, even patent, universal experience. This has always seemed, to me, tied to commodification, one step away from assigning a dollar amount to something that used to be free. I regularly argue that “a sprint” is working until the work is done, and “iteration” drafting. (Yes, “drafting” was once lingo, too. I’m not only a curmudgeon but a hypocrite.) My point is that the more universal the terminology one uses, the more creative the available responses. This argument has gotten me far. I live in a lingo-light household—under a rock, as evidenced above.

Learning “GIGO” was useful to answering your question. I think old cooking wisdom being repackaged and sold—as content, as IP, as a hack, as a fad—is similar, in tastefulness and effect, to calling a meeting a “one-on-one,” or a problem a “bug.” Humans have been using bones and trimmings to add flavor to boiling water for as long as we have cooked. Which bones and trimmings we’ve used has relied, sequentially, on two things: availability and flavor. When we were hungry, any soup, even if definitively “sow’s purse,” would have been welcome. When we could afford to be discerning, we began to exclude ingredients that made our soups worse.

Even the earliest recipes for vegetable stocks warned against the inclusion of brassicas—the botanical family that includes cabbage, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, collard greens, turnips, mustards, and other flowering, leafy plants. And yet, probably because the age-old practice of using good-tasting trimmings to make a stock has been repackaged so many different ways—as “bone broth,” good for epidermal and intestinal health, as “zero waste,” good for the environment—the basic wisdom of beginning with what is available, then culling based on flavor, is repeatedly forgotten, and needs to be retaught.

You mention that your trimmings have been carefully curated. I can’t know whether you mean that you knew to exclude eggplant stems and pepper cores, but let a cauliflower leaf or turnip top slip through the cracks. When a broth I’ve made has tasted bad, it has been because, out of optimism, I let a single cabbage leaf into the mix, wondering how much harm a single leaf could really do. The proof of how much is, in this case, in the sipping. A single brassica leaf or stem makes a stock stinky and definitely sow-y.

But even a combination of the vegetables I save for vegetable stock—a limited slate of alliums (like onion, garlic, leek), carrot, celery, fennel, and parsley stems, with an occasional tomato top added if its summer—can produce a muddy broth if cooked for too long. In my experience, a vegetable stock is a 45-minute long endeavor. Longer will result in over-saturation. An mistaken ratio of ingredients can do the same—overload a stock with carrot bits once to learn how useless the resulting sweet liquid is; that’s also the number of times you need to err by adding too much allium, leaving you with something that smells like a cheesesteak and tastes like one’s mouth after a big night. Best is to stick to a ratio that mirrors that of mirepoix: 2:1:1, allium, celery, carrot. (Fennel can substitute for celery or carrot or part of both.)

Dear cook, I do not think yours is a case of GIGO— “garbage in, garbage out,” or bad inputs precipitating bad results. I think it may be one of “Too much of one thing in, funky stock out,” or “Too long on the stove, muddy-tasting stock out,” or even “Erroneous brassica stealing the show.” I don’t have an abbreviation for any of those, and I’m glad I don’t. Each of them is a mistake worth making once, and taking stock of, in hopes of future stock success.