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Comment by fwlr | Hacker News Reader

Restaurants are in the sweet spot of the economy of scale when it comes to things like sauces and stocks. Households can be a bit too small; making chicken stock is practical, but not effortless. Commercial processed food corporations on the other hand are too big; they can afford to formulate a witch’s brew of Flavoring 31A, Refined Extract Concentrate, and Butylated Hydroxysorbate that 9 out of 10 focus group participants agree reminds them of chicken stock. But restaurants have the manpower, facilities, and quantity of ingredients to make a lot of stocks and sauces from scratch and iterate on the recipe and process until it’s really good. (Once you get to about five chefs in the kitchen brigade you start to see the position of saucier, a chef whose job is just preparing sauces.) If the menu mentions soup, broth, stock, jus, or demi-glace I make a beeline for it and I’m usually in for a treat.

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I'd argue that restaurants _don't_ have the manpower to do this. Restaurant margins are small as it is, and while I don't have concrete numbers to back this statement up, it feels like designating (or even hiring) someone to upcycle products like chicken bones into stock would be prohibitively expensive, in comparison to just buying prepackaged stock in bulk.

Except prepackaged stock is either cheap or good but never both.

Except that industrial stock is expensive compared to trimmings (free) and tastes terrible, and the cook assigned to make stock is also doing other tasks.

I don’t have concrete numbers either, so take this with a grain of salt (heh), but my experiences working with chefs is that it generally does make economic sense - and when it’s on the margin, most chefs also have a bit of professional pride that will tip the scales. Labour in the restaurant kitchen has an element of the “on-call” dynamic: you have to have enough hands in the kitchen to handle the peak (which generally lasts around 2 hours) but there’s downtime before and after the peak where they do prep work. Stock fits pretty neatly into ”start it before lunch service and finish it after dinner service”, for example.

One place I worked had buffalo wings on their snack menu, a fried chicken option on their burger menu, and chicken breast schnitzel as a main - the head chef’s costing showed the cheapest option was “process whole chickens: wings for the wings, deboned thighs for the burgers, deboned breasts for the schnitzel”. Put a 20 gallon pot instead of a garbage bin next to whoever’s processing the chickens and you get the meat for chicken stock for free. The wings, burgers, and schnitzels didn’t always sell at the same ratios so you’d sometimes have an excess of one of them from yesterday; that goes in the pot as well. The veggies don’t take long and the pot goes on a burner all day. Any chef walking by during lunch or dinner service skims the froth. When dinner service is winding up, pour it through a strainer to store. (Make sure you do this before the dishie is done for the evening so you can make them clean the pot.)

Because it was so integrated into other necessary processes, it was almost free, and they found a lot of uses for it.

Great comment! Made me really nostalgic for my restaurant days. 13 years before I got into tech and I still miss it sometimes whenever I have a great meal and can tell the staff is functioning as a solid unit.

One thing that changed the dynamic for me was adding gelatin to store bought stock. I think I originally got that tip from Kenji (who was quoted in the article). If not it was definitely from Serious Eats.

It's nowhere near as good as the real deal, but it provides a great effort to value ratio.

Yeah the gelatin trick is huge. Store-bought stock/broth does a decent job of tasting like real chicken stock, and then the added gelatin does a decent job of feeling like real chicken stock.

It's as close to the real deal as it is probably worth to the home cook. I recently made a huge batch of beef stock and turkey stock over the same two days. After skimming the fat, all the filtering, heating and cooling, and portioning, then freezing, I hit me that while this stock is damn good, I had spent an absolute shitton of money, burned a bunch of fossil fuels, spent a bunch of electricity, and a lot of time, for a couple quarts of stock. A quart of kitchen basics low sodium and two packets of Knox gelatin get me 80% of the way there for fractions of the cost and time.

The trick is to freeze the stock in ice cube trays (the latex ones that make 2” cubes), and divide the spoils of your effort among a future dozen or so recipes. The marginal value of half a cup of homemade stock in a dish is typically massive.

The trick is to make stock in an Instant Pot (or other electronic pressure cooker). It’s low effort and can be done with accumulated frozen scraps.

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