Demi-Glace: The Journey Continues...

Yesterday's festivities began with roasting the veal bones.  

I'm glad I picked up two roasting pans as I ended up having exactly the right amount of floor space for the ten pounds of bones.  The bones I'd received from the butcher were a mixture of marrow bones and knuckles.  I used a bit of salt and pepper on them, but just a tad since I'm fairly nervous about how concentrated that salt will be once I reduce it down.  When I made those glazed ducks for Thanksgiving, I decided to use the carcasses to make a stock, but it ended up being so horribly salty that despite my many efforts to recover, I ended up just ditching the whole thing.  I've heard that you can't fix stupid.  Well, you can't fix salt either.  The irony is that diluting an overly salted stock is counter-productive since the whole point is to reduce it back down again.

But I digress...

With the veal bones roasting away in the 500 degree oven, I moved on to prepping my veggies and bouquet garni.  

As I mentioned in the previous post, I opted for carrots, leeks and shallots.  When I think mire poix, I picture a finely chopped mixture of three savory vegetables.  I knew that trying to navigate around "finely chopped" veggies while skimming the stock would be nothing short of a nightmare, so I went for the "big hunk of plant matter" approach.  In hindsight, I might even take it a step farther if I ever decide to do this again.  Shallots and leeks have a way of separating their many little layers and multiplying their own surface area exponentially.  This is fine for a soup, but for a stock, it made the process a bit tedious.  I also ended up with some fairly charred pieces of leek/shallot/unrecognizable-pieces-of-carbon once they'd been through the 45 minutes of roasting.

As usual, the shallots had me crying.  A lot.  Like a hormonal adolescent post-break-up girl.  Whenever I cut onions or shallots I end up with tears streaming down my face, blinding me to the process below, involving a very finely tuned sharp knife.  My eyes will usually just shut, on their own, without my permission and without any response to my attempted interventions.  I've tried everything, all the wives tales, and I'm sorry but they just flat out don't work.  The closest I've come to relief is my snowboarding goggles.  I'm sure it's a sight for my neighbors.  I have a theory that my body has a chemical sensitivity to raw onions.  I know you're scoffing.  People chastise me for tediously picking out every little last bit of finely diced raw onion from my food, but this just shows me that they clearly don't have the same reaction in their mouths that I do when I eat onion.  I literally want to remove my tongue.  I'll taste that terrible taste all day too.  There's nothing crueler to me that getting a dish that I've been really looking forward to, only to find HIDDEN raw onion in it, (especially common with salads and sandwiches and slaws).  Even picking it out doesn't really remove the flavor, but it does manage to make my fingers smell like onion for a day.  And yet again, I digress... (but that's why you're reading this anyway, isn't it?).

So, onto the bouquet garni... (who doesn't love saying that word?).


I went with a pretty simplistic little bundle.  Parsley, bay leaf and peppercorns.  I added a few springs of thyme after this photo was taken.  I'd read a few suggestions about using the outer layer of the leek to wrap up parsley stems, thyme and bay leaves, (something about being resourceful?!) but I was pretty sure I wanted to include peppercorns and just couldn't picture the origami feats I'd have to accomplish with those leeks to keeps those little peppercorns encased.  Plus, I'm going to be honest, at this point in the process, I'm just not that concerned about using up that outer leek layer or reducing my cheese cloth usage.  I bought a 20qt pot and two roasting pans.  Frugality went out the window very early in this undertaking.  

I was happy to find an excuse to use some more bay leaves.  It takes me far too long to make it through a purchase of bay leaves.  I wish I'd think to use them more often.  They always add a nice layer of flavor to soups, stocks, gravies.  Maybe that will be one of my New Year's resolutions:  use more bay leaf.  I think it's an appropriate goal.  That, and perhaps vacuum more often.

 Last night, a few friends and I were watching the movie Babies, which I'd highly recommend.  At one point, they took this adorable little Mongolian baby and wrapped it up super tight and then tied it up around the shoulders and legs.  All I could think was, "it's like a little bouquet garni of cuteness!" at which point I realized how grossly girly I was being and shushed myself.  Looking back at the photo though, there is definitely a resemblance...

The roasting veal bones filled my house with a really amazing smell.  

Unfortunately, though, that smell made it all the way up to my bedroom and saturated the house.  As a side note: I woke up this morning smelling roasted veal fat and thinking, "I want to eat a small cow."  This is generally not a great way to start your Sunday morning, a) because veal really is pretty inhumane and I shouldn't develop a craving for it, and b) because who the hell is going to be there, roasted veal in hand, ready to serve you on a Sunday morning?  I settled for a self-prepared soy latte.  It wasn't quite the same.

I added the veggies to the pan and roasted for an additional 45 minutes.   

The roasted veggies and veal bones then went into the pot while I deglazed the pans and added the liquid to the pot.

I added the 8 quarts of cold water to the pot, brought it to a simmer and reduced the heat.  As the liquid reduces, I'm adding more water to keep the bones covered, and I'm skimming.  Lots and lots of skimming.  I started off with an oil-continuous layer on the top of the stock, which made it hard to tell what was actually oil and what was water.  I was fooling myself.  It was all oil.  I'm now to a point where I can keep up with the fat as it rises to the surface.  I'll be doing this for another 8 hours, while also preparing dinner for a friend that is coming over tonight.  

I did say that I was excited about this, right?

I'm sure the final product will be worth it.  I have a feeling that I'll end up doing the five hours of reduction tomorrow after work, so the final product photos will finish out the trilogy...