What you need to invest in the “stock” market

Stock markets worldwide have been in an erratic see-saw pattern for weeks. Lucky for there is one type of stock that is immune to these vagaries in fortune – cooking stock. Jenny Linford’s recent cookbook, The Missing Ingredient: The Curious Role of Time in Food and its Flavour, discusses stock and a whole lot more.

The Missing Ingredient is about what makes good food, and the first book to consider the intrinsic yet often forgotten role of time in creating the flavours and textures we love. Written through a series of encounters with ingredients, producers, cooks, shopkeepers and chefs, exploring everything from the brief period in which sugar caramelises, or the days required in the crucial process of fermentation, to the months of slow ripening and close attention that make a great cheddar, or the years needed for certain wines to reach their peak, Jenny Linford shows how, time and again, time itself is the invisible ingredient. 

Linford recently provided an excerpt from the book to The Splendid Table, a deep dive into how time is an important ingredient in achieving a good result when making any kind of stock. In addition to discussing standbys like beef and chicken stocks, the chapter on stocks also takes on Asian stocks like dashi, and on those that are mainly used in a restaurant setting like veal stock. Linford interviews Pierre Koffmann who explains how he makes the unctuous broth, saying that it takes “24 hours to make veal stock” and that his cooks “use veal bones because they give a lot of gelatine as they are high in cartilage. First you roast the bones until they have a very nice caramelized colour. They shouldn’t be too dark otherwise it gives a burnt taste, but nicely brown all over, so it takes time to do that”, he explains.