Martha Stewart's Trick For The Best Beef Stock

Stock, whether it's the roasted vegetable variety, the carefully calculated chicken kind, or the silken liquid imbued with beefy flavor, sure factors into a lot of recipes. It's always a good idea to keep a few boxes of the stuff packed away in your pantry for all your à la minute needs, but it's also extra special to make it from scratch whenever you can. Martha Stewart's homemade beef stock trick not only fills your home with the bubbly perfume of roasted red meat and aromatics, it also makes the savory liquid as flavorful as possible. She crucially rinses any remaining fond (the tasty browned morsels left over after cooking) from her roasting pan right into the pot itself to eke out every last bit of possible flavor.

In a clip posted to her YouTube channel, the cooking, entertaining, and media magnate browns 4 pounds of veal shank bones and oxtails (she also recommends using neck bones) in neutral cooking oil. She then stirs in a bit of tomato paste and tosses in onions, celery, carrots, and garlic to roast some more. After removing those goodies and placing them in a big stockpot, the ever-industrious Stewart ultimately deglazes the roasting pan with red wine and pours the mix into the pot. 

When the time comes to top it all off with water, she rinses the pan under the tap and right into the pot, too. That's yet more beefy flavor that would have been washed down the drain, but as Stewart notes, it instead further fortifies the stock. And it takes mere seconds in the otherwise hours-long scheme of things.

Roasted veggie stock also benefits from a good roasting pan rinse directly into the stockpot. You'll just follow the same steps that Martha Stewart takes for her beef stock. That principle also applies to your poultry stock preparations, and to any meat that benefits from the Maillard reaction (the process during cooking that creates the fond you're looking to fully incorporate into your finished product).

This reaction is what makes rinsing the roasting pan so important. It's also what gives "browning" its name, as heat from the pan causes your food to develop its enticing color, lovely seared surface, and resulting concentration of flavor that creates the fond that Martha Stewart painstakingly incorporates into her beef stock. Browning your beef bits enough to trigger the Maillard reaction is a relatively low-effort way to enhance the quality of a stock.

After all that hard work roasting and rinsing, you'll want to ensure your lovingly crafted stock lasts as long as possible. While you'll get a solid three to four days of use in the fridge, in the freezer, the savory stuff keeps for three to four months, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Of course, making things from scratch can be time-consuming. Should you ever find yourself needing to add extra flavor to a stock or broth absent the time needed for roasting bones, sparking the Maillard reaction, and reaping its tasty benefits, Stewart has a simpler additive tip: She builds flavor faster with a bit of bouillon.