My first dozen batches of stock were bad — unbalanced, weak, bitter, whatever else could go wrong. The worst one wasn’t even a flavour problem. In the chaos of a working kitchen, I grabbed a colander instead of a fine strainer and poured an afternoon’s worth of stock straight down the drain. I stood there for a second before it registered what I’d just done. It wasn’t really a story about being careless; it was a reminder that I needed a method I could repeat, not instincts I could only trust on a good day.
A lot of the principles in cookery are obvious in hindsight. Like: what can you put in stock? Assuming you want your stock to taste good, you put in things that taste good and are safe to eat. It’s important to remember that stock is really just a savoury tea, and the process itself needs to be matched with ingredients that extract well.
While the premise is simple, there is a lot of well-meaning but ultimately bad advice about what goes into a good stock. For example, you see people indiscriminately freezing all of their vegetable scraps for stock without thinking about how well they extract, what they taste like, and what condition they’re in. The result can be inconsistent and disappointing.
Ingredients to avoid
Of the various ingredients, there are some you should generally or always avoid when making stock:
- Cruciferous vegetables (brassicas like broccoli, cabbage, kale) tend to turn bitter, thanks to the sulphur-containing compounds in them.
- Mouldy or rotten vegetables carry the same risk, plus toxins that don’t break down even with long simmers.
- Starchy vegetables (potatoes, parsnips) tend to cloud a stock without adding much flavour — more of a problem if you’re after a consommé-clear broth than if you’re building a soup base anyway.
- Many vegetable peels can be bitter and may carry pesticide residue from commercial farming. Wash or soak vegetables before peeling, and taste peels before adding them to a stock.
- Many non-cruciferous leafy greens and herbs turn bitter or off-flavoured over longer simmer times.
- Certain animal parts add strong, off flavours to stock: see the examples below.
There are exceptions to these rules. With care, some chefs get great flavour out of roasted cabbage (for example). A small amount of carrot greens can add a herbaceous note to short-simmered stocks.
Examples
A few specific cases are worth calling out directly. These carry both a flavour and a safety consideration:
| Ingredient | Flavour | Safety |
|---|---|---|
| Carrot peels | Can be bitter, taste before using. | Wash aggressively before peeling to remove dirt and pesticide residue. |
| Carrot tops (greens and the crown end) | The greens turn bitter when cooked. Use sparingly, and taste for bitterness. | Wash aggressively. The crown end may hold dirt, pesticides, or mould; peel it. |
These are a flavour risk only, nothing to do with safety:
| Ingredient | Flavour |
|---|---|
| Pygostyle (or pope’s nose) | Can be bitter when roasted (as it contains the uropygial gland that produces oil for preening). |
| Organ meat | Can be bitter or gamey in stock. |
Ingredients to use sparingly
Another class of stock ingredients is those that should be used sparingly. These ingredients are not unsafe or even unsavoury, but can dominate a stock either due to over-extraction or unbalanced flavours. These ingredients tend to include things like sweet vegetables (like carrots), opinionated vegetables (like fennel bulb or celery), or strong spices (like fennel seed or celery seed).
Ingredients that should work, but don’t
There are other ingredients that seem to make sense for stock but, based on the cooking method, don’t tend to work well with long simmers or under pressure. These include things like miso paste (long simmers flatten the subtle notes) and kombu (which tastes better kept below a simmer). Acids also tend to do poorly: they’re for balancing a finished soup, and seem to throw off the extraction when added early. That’s unconfirmed, but it follows standard French technique, which adds acid at the end.
The method, not the instinct
None of this is really about any single ingredient. It’s about having a method you trust before you’re standing over a pot at the end of a long day, making decisions on autopilot. My method now stays at the cooktop instead of migrating to the sink, which is where the colander incident happened: fish the solids out with a spider into a bowl, pour the stock into a smaller pot to reduce, then strain the reduced stock through a fine mesh strainer. The ingredients stay simple and consistent too, the same short list batch after batch, so I’m not relearning the recipe under pressure.
The whole process, step by step, is in Stock. For the actual ratios, see Chicken or turkey stock, Basic chicken ramen stock, Beef stock, and Rich veg/mushroom stock.