Autumn cooking is stock-dependent in a way that summer cooking isn’t. The slow braises, the risottos, the bean stews, the pan sauces — all of them rely on a liquid that carries flavour into the finished dish. Water does the job technically. Stock does it properly.
This isn’t a call for elaborate production. Good stock is a background task. You make it when you have the raw material — chicken carcasses after a roast, the vegetable trimmings from prep — and it takes almost no active attention. What it requires is time and attention to a few principles.
Chicken stock
This is the most versatile stock, and the one worth making most often. The raw material is whatever’s left after a roast chicken: the carcass, the bones, any juices from the roasting tin. You can also use raw chicken wings, which are inexpensive and produce a richer, more gelatinous result.
The approach:
Put the carcass and bones into a large pan. Cover with cold water — not hot, not boiling. The cold start draws impurities to the surface more gradually and produces a clearer result. Bring slowly to a simmer over medium heat. As it approaches simmering, grey foam will begin appearing at the surface. Skim this off with a ladle or spoon. You don’t need to remove every last trace, but getting rid of most of it in the first ten minutes produces a noticeably cleaner-tasting stock.
Once the foam has subsided, add: a halved onion (skin on is fine), two carrots broken in half, two sticks of celery, a bay leaf, a few peppercorns, a small bunch of thyme or parsley stalks. Do not add salt — you’ll season the finished dish. Keep the heat at a gentle simmer: the liquid should trembling rather than bubbling. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat into the stock and makes it cloudy and greasy.
Cook for 3–4 hours. The liquid will reduce and deepen. Strain through a fine sieve into a clean container, discarding the solids. Leave to cool. Once cold, the fat will solidify on the surface and can be removed easily — or left in if using immediately.
This stock keeps for 5 days in the fridge. It freezes well for 3 months. Freeze in 200ml portions — ice cube trays work perfectly for smaller volumes — so you can take out only what’s needed.
Vegetable stock
Vegetable stock takes 45 minutes rather than 3 hours, and the raw material can come almost entirely from prep waste. The approach is the same: everything goes into cold water, brought to a simmer, simmered without boiling.
What works well: onion skins and trimmings, carrot peelings, celery and celeriac trimmings, leek tops, mushroom stalks (these add body and depth and are especially valuable in the stock), parsley stalks, bay leaves, thyme, peppercorns.
What doesn’t work: brassicas (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower — they produce a bitter and sulphurous stock), starchy vegetables like potato (they make the stock thick and cloudy in the wrong way), beetroot (it colours everything), anything that’s gone off.
Simmer for 45 minutes, no longer. Vegetables release their flavour quickly and begin returning something flatter and more vegetal if they cook for too long. Strain and season lightly.
Why it matters in autumn cooking
A chicken braise made with water is a chicken braise. Made with good chicken stock, the braising liquid becomes a sauce — something complex, gelatinous, deeply flavoured — without additional effort. The stock does the work.
The same applies to a pearl barley risotto, a white bean stew, a lentil soup. The base liquid carries flavour into every grain, every bean, every piece of meat it’s in contact with. There’s no technique that compensates for a poor base. A dish made with water and then corrected with seasoning at the end has a different quality to one where the flavour has built throughout.
This is why we make stock. Not for complexity or difficulty, but because it’s the foundation, and foundations matter.
The difference between a good dish and a very good dish is often not the main ingredient. It’s what the main ingredient cooked in.