Wilto Makes Food

Category: staples

Utility Stock

Active Time

30 min

Total Time

Up to 3 hours

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to turn freezer section ingredients into ramen-caliber stock, and this is the result.

If I were the sort of person who comes to possess chicken backs during the course of my day-to-day life, well, this would be a different recipe. Leave out the shortribs and you’ve got my go-to chicken stock; leave them in and you’ve got something rich enough enough to hold up to Curry Rice, form the basis for ramen, or just, y’know, be a soup.

I’d maybe call this “toridashi,” but not confidently. I know “tori” means chicken and I know “dashi” means stock—but this is more of a pork stock than anything else. The BBC has a recipe for something kind of similar, and they call it “toridashi,” so hey, why not. It’s really more of a broth, where I’m starting with off-the-shelf proteins and not a Halloween’s worth of bones.

There are only a couple of things in here that you might have trouble finding at your local supermarket: kombu and katsuobushi. They’re the basis for glutimate-rich dashi: a salty kelp and dried, smoked, fermented skipjack tuna flakes. Those might require a trip to a store that specializes in Japanese ingredients—or, y’know, Amazon. You can get by without them here, but they’re cheap and shelf-stable; they’re good to have in.

On Clarity

Thanks to years of cooking The French Way, I’ve always sought to make crystal-clear stocks—avoiding any boil beyond the initial bone-scrubbing boil. I still get plenty of milage out of a white stock—in fact, I more or less use this same recipe for it, give or take a couple sprigs of thyme, minus the pork, without browning steps, and with one important difference: the speed at which I depressurize my pressure cooker.

See, boiling is the enemy of clear stocks. All that activity emulsifies the fats, and those emulsified fats make things cloudy. This isn’t a bad thing: when you’re aiming for a super rich stocks—think tonkotsu—but it probably isn’t what you’d want in a delicately-balanced risotto. On a stovetop, that involves some fussing; you want to keep the temperature high enough to, y’know, make stock, but without letting it tip over into a boil.

As hot as it gets in there, a pressure cooker likely won’t bring your stock to a full rolling boil; the pressure actually prevents it. If you hit the manual release, though, things come to a boil in a hurry—giving you a cloudy, fatty stock, for better or worse.

So, Yeah: Instant Pot

Let’s get this out of the way early on in the life of this blog: the Instant Pot is extremely good. I mean, it’s not all good—the interface is largely inscrutable, and the “sauté” function tends to err a little on the side of “char”—but for my money, it beats the hell out of messing around with a stovetop pressure cooker. I’ll do a full review of it at some point.

Now, because I’ve got deep-seated temperature control issues, I tend to avoid the built-in “sauté” setting for the browning and initial boiling steps. I don’t know that I’m supposed to, warranty-wise, but I pull the inner pot and set it right on the burner instead of dirtying a stockpot. If you want to one-pot this thing, though, I won’t stop you: just sauté the aeromatics in there instead of a stand-alone skillet, and set them aside until you’re ready for them.

You can get by without a pressure cooker, for sure—because this thing errs on the side of over-the-top richness, it won’t mean eight hours of carefully attended simmering. But, since you’re not dealing exclusively with bones, extracting enough gelatin to make it feel rich might require a little help—add a packet of gelatin early on, and you’re good to go.

On Salt

Notice that I don’t add salt anywhere in here—same reason I burn through so much unsalted butter, and use little-to-no-salt-added store-bought stock in a pinch: you’re gonna be able to add more salt to whatever you end up making with this. You’re not gonna be able to take salt out.