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I've got nothing against canned goods. I like canned beans and canned tomatoes, canned olives and canned cream of corn. They make life easy, and, truth be told, don’t sacrifice all that much in the way of flavor. But though I’ll use canned stock, if there’s absolutely no other alternative, there’s no denying it: the store-bought stuff’s barely even the same substance as a good, homemade stock. Good stock is the secret to fabulous sauces, sensational soups, sublime risottos. It can add an instant shot of rich, low-fat flavor to an otherwise ho-hum stir-fry. It will make your food taste better. Which is why, if you’re at all serious about cooking good food, you should stop reaching for the cans – or even worse, those bouillon cubes – and make stock from scratch. Now before you worry that I’m getting all Martha Stewart on you or anything, let me assure you: stock’s a no-brainer to make. It doesn’t require fancy ingredients or elaborate techniques and, at its most basic, involves little more than throwing a bunch of very roughly chopped ingredients into a big pot of water. After all, stock is just flavored water. It can be flavored with meat, with seafood, with bones, with veggies, in an endless array of delicious combinations. If you’re being a purist, stock is unsalted, the rationale being that since you will be using it to cook some other, more involved dish, at a later point, it makes more sense to add the appropriate amount of salt for whatever specific dish your concocting. You can make stock from fresh, whole ingredients, or from leftover trimmings and scraps that you’ve accumulated in your freezer over time. It’s cheap. It’s easy. It’s even sort of meditative. What to put in …
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