Without an understanding of stock, jus, etc., it is not possible to make deep progress in the art of cooking. This applies around the globe, albeit in very different forms. And it applies regardless of what you eat or don’t eat. The ingredients may change, but the technique remains the same.
This topic is therefore very important to us and can be explored using the tag cloud or the blog’s search function under “broth” and “sauce”.
Unfortunately, terminology is not uniform internationally and therefore there are always ambiguities and misunderstandings. We try to offer the simplest possible path through the jungle without claiming to be the only truth. There are other ways to describe what we present here, but that doesn’t make our version wrong.
Fond
It all starts with a fond, also known as stock or broth.
This is the simplest extraction of flavour in water. No salt is added and the process usually takes hours. Here are two examples:
Consommé
The consommé is a double broth. The basic ingredients are simmered gently for a long time not with water, but with a previously prepared stock, which intensifies the resulting liquid massively.
Here is our recipe for classic beef consommé:
Jus
A similar technique is used for a jus.
We have already explained how to create a dark veal fond here:
Now you can make a very dark base of roasted ingredients and cook it slowly with a previously cooked stock – not just water – as with the consommé. This multiplies the flavours already present in the stock.
Here’s how this works, for example:
Half meat bones and half marrow bones (in our case, veal or beef) are spread out on baking paper on an oven tray. Preheat the oven to 250 °C without fan.
A higher temperature does no harm, on the contrary, but it shortens the roasting time. It also works without baking paper, but then scrubbing the tray becomes a tough job. At 250 °C, it takes around 40 minutes until the bones are deeply browned.
Vegetables are roasted during this time. As always with sauces, they do not need to be peeled (except for onions and celeriac), just washed. Cutting them into large pieces is sufficient.
You can also roast the vegetables in the oven, but it takes a completely different time as roasting the bones, so it’s impractical. A little neutral vegetable oil, a large pot and plenty of heat will also do the job. The vegetables should take on colour.
Once they are well browned, add tomato concentrate, which should be roasted at the bottom of the pot for about 2 minutes. Alternatively, you can add tinned tomatoes. Then add liquid. This starts with red wine and port wine. Then you can add water, but for a strong jus it is better to use a previously cooked stock. At the end, we will come up with a classic and clever solution from the professional kitchen for this.
The roasted bones are also added to the pot, along with spices. Peppercorns, juniper and/or allspice and bay leaves would be the classic choice, but many things are possible. We have explained variations in our recipe for dark veal stock.
Simmer everything on a low heat for 5 or 6 hours. Bubbles should form, but a rolling boil would be wrong. After that, the liquid has almost completely taken on the flavour.
All the fat that has oozed out will float to the surface. So leave the pot to cool for a long time, preferably overnight, so that the fat solidifies and can be easily removed.
What remains is passed through a sieve to remove bones, vegetables and spices. We have already explained this for the consommé double. Then pass the liquid through a hair sieve or, ideally, a cheesecloth.
The result is liquid gold, which can now be reduced to taste by simmering and thus concentrated.
If this liquid is allowed to cool, it turns into jelly. This is due to the collagen that has been released from the bones and connective tissue.
We make our jus liquid again by heating it up and fill it into ice cube trays. They measure 16 x 15 ml = 240 ml per container. We freeze almost half a liter of jus in this way and will season some of our dishes with ice cubes over the coming weeks and months.
And now for the clever solution that was announced: once the contents of the pot have been passed through the sieve, bones, vegetables and spices are left behind. All of them are already quite exhausted, but not completely. So you put them back into the pot and slowly boil them again with water (based on this recipe: 3 liters for 5 hours). The result is a stock that you can use to prepare the next jus – and so on. This process is called remouillage in classic French cooking. Look that up.
Ingredients (for 0.5 – 1.0 liter jus, depending on concentration):
2 kg meat and marrow bones from veal/beef
3 tbsp neutral vegetable oil
200 g onions
A total of 1 kg carrots, celery, parsley root (optional) and leek
400 g tinned tomatoes or 3 tbsp tomato puree
0.7 l red wine
0.5 l port wine
3 bay leaves
12 peppercorns
5 juniper berries and/or allspice grains
2.5 l veal or beef stock (does not have to be a dark stock)
