Culinary Communion: Class Photos

	The kitchen is the room that nurtures our souls and our bodies. It's the hearth of the 21st-century house, and everybody naturally congregates there.
—Regina Leeds, author of The Zen of Organizing

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Culinary Techniques Series, January 2002

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Stock is one of the most important fundamentals of Western cuisine. A lot of food is cooked in or involves flavorful liquid. Braises, soups, sauces, and everything else that involves liquid is affected by the quality of that liquid: how flavorful it is, how salty, how much body it has, how easily it can go bad, and on and on. Starting with excellent, flavorful, pure stock is one of the biggest favors you can do for yourself as a cook. We teach this class so that students can build themselves a freezer full of the highest-quality stock and use it to improve all the rest of their cooking many times over.

The students listen as Chef Gabriel explains stock's history and uses and the process involved in making it. The ten-gallon stock pot on the stove may be a bit overwhelming at first.

The elements that make up stock aren't always the most aesthetically pleasing. Here a student adds some delightful-looking fish parts to the stock pot. At least she's happy about it, maybe thinking about how good the stock will be as a result.

The fish parts in the stock. They'll cook down and eventually be strained out to leave only their rich flavor.

Roasting the bones and vegetables that go into stock, and adding a bit of tomato product, produces a rich, round flavor and a nice brown color in stock.

A student diligently skims the impurities off of a bubbling stock. Fat and other impurities in the stock will rise to the top as it cooks, allowing the cook to remove them and create a very clean final product.

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