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Comment by pohl | Hacker News Reader

from your local soup store

Where does one need to live to find soup stores? I've never seen one in a half century of living.

It is actually not very difficult to make stock, except you have to wait some hours for it to cook, so I guess lack of time to cook is the driving force behind soup stores. However, if you don't have the time to cook stock it is likely that you also lack the time to cook the rest of the meal to a quality that matches the expensive stock...

The bottled stock you can get in regular supermarkets is also better than the cubes. I can recommend it.

Boxed stock (the "organic" stuff and the "low-sodium" stuff) is uniformly terrible compared to real stock. I'm not quite as aggressive about this as Michael "USE WATER INSTEAD" Ruhlman is, but he's right: box stock makes dishes taste muddy and don't bring much real flavor to the party.

Real stock does take time, but it's unattended time. The trick is to do it in the oven instead of on your cooktop. A slow oven running all day with some chicken bones and some wings will produce reliably good stock.

Won't it be cloudy? I'll admit I'm far from an expert, but culinary school teaches you that you must skim constantly. Otherwise those particles break down and the denatured proteins dissolve back in and you're left with cloudy stock.

I don't skim constantly. If I wanted consomme, I'd use gelatin clarification. I just want stock to braise with or make heavy soup with.

Maybe I read too many Thomas Keller books :) He'd yell at you for not skimming.

Here's Ruhlman's take (he wrote Keller's cookbook, and also "The Making Of A Chef", from which I learned that stocks are adequately clarified only when you can read the date off a dime at the bottom of the pot).

http://ruhlman.com/2011/04/easy-chicken-stock-recipe/

I skim once or twice, but really I just roast bones, stick 'em in a pot, cover with water, and leave it in the oven all day.

I roast a lot of chickens; at least 2 a week, but often more; it is my lazy weeknight dinner for the family. This is unrelated to the thread, but if you haven't seen this video, I highly recommend you drop everything and watch it; it is the greatest thing on the Internet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAekQ5fzfGM

I bone out every chicken to the legs and roast for 40 minutes or so; it's bulletproof. I've gotten pretty fast at boning out birds.

I just truss and roast whole, probably once a week or so. Basically the recipe in the beginning of the Bouchon cookbook.

I used to do that. That's what Ruhlman says in his sex chicken recipe, too. But boned out and flattened whole chickens make extra extra crispy skin, cook faster, and are especially easy to stuff with butter or sausage.

I am curious how long it takes you to completely bone out a chicken. In Chinese Cooking Class, good old Gabriel Chen could do it in a very short period of time.

I'm a little slow and can still do it in maybe 2 minutes. It's really one of those things that just takes practice.

Do HN folks who get into cooking all follow the same path? I read "Kitchen Confidential" for fun, then moved on to "The Making of A Chef" and Keller's cookbooks when I got more interested.

My partners and I all read Kitchen Confidential shortly before starting the company; it is a really great startup book, even though it has nothing at all to do with startups.

In some cuisines, like Korean, there are dishes that are made specially with a cloudy stock. If you are a home cook it shouldn't matter so much. It's mostly an aesthetic issue, although if a stock is particularly fatty I will clarify it.

I know of a couple in San Francisco. One in Cleveland. See them in almost any city. Remember the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld?

That explains it. You probably have no idea how fortunate you are.

I'll be the first to admit to being fortunate, but I don't think that makes me a rarity here.

Fair enough. For some reason Wierd Al's old movie UHF comes to mind, where he has a fake ad for a store that specializes in just spatulas. I bet San Fran and New York have one of these, too. ;-)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=2XbCWmY0eqY

Meanwhile, the rest of us have to buy spatulas from non-specialty stores like an idiot. Maybe it's time for someone to bring Spatula City into the internet age.

You cannot cook anything decent that way. At bare minimum, buy a decent spatula from your local spatula store.

A benefit of larger cities is more specialized stores, for sure.

Locally to me in London, are The Spice Shop (just spices and spice mixes) and Clerkenwell Screws (comprehensive stock of nuts and bolts in all thread pitches, people behind the counter with 50+ years of experience recognizing and sourcing screws).

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