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How Coffee Brewing Makes Better Vegetable Stock - YouTube
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(upbeat music)
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(music fades)
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- Coffee might finally
have broken my brain.
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You're looking at this,
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you can see I have coffee
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but you can see a lot of vegetables,
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you're wondering what is going on here.
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You've clicked the title.
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You know that something is going on
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with vegetable stock and coffee.
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Let me explain.
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Now, stick with me.
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I guarantee there's a payoff coming
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if you have any interest whatsoever
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in food cooking and cooking science.
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So, I was watching a
video on making stock.
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That happens.
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I'm a normal person.
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I don't think that's weird
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but I was watching them prep the stock
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and they were putting big
chunks of vegetable in.
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Do you know what it made me think of?
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(coffee beans rustling)
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Someone making a V60 with
just whole coffee beans.
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It seemed to me that having a
very large piece of vegetable
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wasn't a very efficient way to make stock
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but I looked at some more
videos and more videos
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and everyone seems to put
these big hunks of vegetable
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into their vegetable stock.
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This doesn't make sense.
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We know from the world of coffee
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that the finer you grind your coffee,
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the more surface area you expose,
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the more extraction of flavour you can do.
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Right? That's key.
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Now in coffee, there's some
flavour we don't want, right?
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But I would argue for the
most part in a carrot,
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we want as much as possible.
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A carrot is delicious.
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If I eat a carrot, I
think that's delicious.
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If I eat a coffee bean, I
don't think that's delicious.
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Right? You can taste some of the stuff
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that maybe you don't want to extract
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when you are brewing coffee.
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So here's what I'm thinking.
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Instead of just chopping big,
ugly pieces of vegetable.
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What if we went finer and finer and finer?
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What if we went to an extreme?
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What if we juiced the vegetables?
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Surely that's gonna be
the most effective way
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of extracting flavour from them, right?
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Now, you might think I'm a coffee person.
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This is a coffee channel.
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What credentials do I have to be talking
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about vegetable stock?
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I thought about that
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and so I roped in someone
much, much smarter than me.
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I called up my friend, Chris Young.
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Now, I've known Chris for
years and years and years.
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I met him when he was running the lab
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at The Fat Duck, Heston
Blumenthal's restaurant,
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as it came up into the kind
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of three Michelin stars, global fame era.
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He then went and co-authored a book
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called "Modernist Cuisine"
which is really the bible
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of modern food science and cookery.
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He then went to cofound ChefSteps
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and he's now starting another new project.
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He also has a YouTube channel.
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You should check it out.
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Now, I called Chris up
and almost instantly,
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he started dropping huge
amounts of knowledge.
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- So, the juicing thing
is really interesting
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and this goes back to 'where
do flavours come from?'
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and this is more true
for, I mean, this is,
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what we don't realize is a lot
of the flavours we identify
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with meats, seafoods, and
especially plant foods,
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they don't intrinsically exist
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in the raw unadulterated piece of meat.
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We all kind of understand
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that you have to roast a piece of meat
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to get the Maillard
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roasty flavours.
- Right.
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- That's kind of obvious, right?
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But what we don't realize
is a cucumber, for example,
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or a tomato for that matter,
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doesn't have much cucumber
flavour or tomato flavour
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until you break the cells
and then a bunch of enzymes
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start to break down
stuff that's in the pulp
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and turn it into the aroma,
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and this is kind of your problem
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with juicing versus cooking.
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As soon as you juice it,
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you're gonna get a lot of flavours
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that otherwise wouldn't
be present in the stock
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because I put a big chunk in,
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I bring it up to a boil, and
the enzymes are destroyed
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before the cells really rupture
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and they can create a lot of flavour.
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It's not to say that your instinct
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of shrink the surface area,
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use less of the stuff is invalid.
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It totally works but to
the extent you're trying
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to adapt one stock recipe to this,
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you're likely to end
up not very successful.
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I think to the extent you
choose a bunch of components
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that go into stock and you
blend them in different ways
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and taste and act like a winemaker trying
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to blend barrels and different varietals
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to come up with something that's good.
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I think you could get to something
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that could be really great.
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I personally think it
will be pretty different
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and you'll realize that this
is kind of a vegetable stock,
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not like any other vegetable
stock on the market
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and in fact, it's delicious,
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but you kind of have to think
of it with a different context
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than 'I'm trying to just come up
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with a cheaper way to make vegetable stock
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that's more frugal and less wasteful'.
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- Okay, so it's time to make some stock.
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I'm gonna make two stocks here.
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I'm gonna make a traditional version
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and then I'm gonna make a juiced version
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to compare it to.
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Now, obviously Chris made me think
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that that juiced version
should be kind of inferior
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even though it's
technically more efficient,
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but we'll find out.
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Now, I need a baseline recipe, right?
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I need someone's recipe
that I think is emblematic
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of how the professional world has talked
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about stocks to the consumers and kitchens
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and there's really no one better, I think,
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than Gordon Ramsay.
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He's a cheffy chef
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but he's also big into the cooking at home
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so he should know how to make
a good vegetable stock, right?
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This recipe is gonna make me
angry and I'll explain why.
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Three onions, peeled and roughly chopped.
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One leek, washed and roughly chopped.
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Two celery stalks, roughly chopped.
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Six carrots, peeled and roughly chopped.
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One head of garlic, halved crosswise.
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Teaspoon of white peppercorns.
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A bay leaf.
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A few thyme, basil, tarragon, coriander,
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and parsley sprigs, tied together.
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200 mls of dry white
wine, and salt and pepper.
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Sensible enough but
everything is roughly chopped.
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It's gonna be big pieces of vegetable
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and I can't imagine we're
gonna get the most out of them.
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Now, this is me just getting a bit angry,
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but seriously, how can
you just say six carrots?
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Gordon, how big is a carrot, right?
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Is a carrot this big? Is it this big?
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Is a carrot this big?
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Because if I get six different carrots,
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my amount of carrots,
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my mass of carrots is all over the place.
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Now, people say I get a bit extreme
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for using grams for everything,
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but how else am I supposed
to have an accurate
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and an easily replicable recipe?
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Just give me the grams.
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Give me the grams, Gordon.
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So, the technique is pretty simple.
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Once everything's peeled and chopped,
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it goes into the pan
with two liters of water.
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We're gonna bring it to the boil,
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simmer it for 20 minutes only.
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We're gonna take the pan off the heat,
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throw in the herbs, throw in the wine,
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throw in a little seasoning,
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and then we're gonna give it a stir,
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and allow it to cool completely.
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Right, at that point,
we're gonna say it's done.
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I'm gonna decant it out
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and we'll then make the
juiced stock afterwards.
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So stock one, the traditional
stock is cooling down.
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It's time for version
two, the juiced version.
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In the first round, doing
Gordon's job for him,
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I weighed everything
that I put in that stock
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and I'm using exactly the
same mass of each thing here.
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There's only really one difference.
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If I juice a whole head of garlic,
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then I'll get a ton of
those enzymatic reactions
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that create those kind of
very harsh garlicky flavours
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of raw garlic.
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I don't want those there.
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Here, I've just poached, kind
of confited a head of garlic
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to get rid of that, to
deactivate those enzymes,
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so that when I do juice it,
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it won't have that same
aggressive pungency.
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A lesson learned from Chris
from our conversation.
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But let's get on with it now.
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Everything is here, ready to go.
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I'm gonna juice the herbs.
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It might go horribly wrong.
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I don't know if it's gonna work well
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but I'm gonna throw
everything kind of in together
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to what we get, really interesting.
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Obviously, this is like
incredibly finely diced carrot
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without that much carrot
flavour, which bodes well
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'cause hopefully most
of the carrot flavour
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is down in the liquid below.
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Now, to keep this consistent,
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I'll have to add this
to two liters of water,
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bring it to the boil and cook it
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and simmer it for 20 minutes,
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and I know 20 minutes is a
pretty short stock cooking time,
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certainly for professional kitchens,
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but that's what Gordon said.
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That's what we're gonna do.
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So we have our two stocks done.
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We have here, our original
stock, Gordon's recipe,
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and then we have the juiced stock here.
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Now, my coffee brain is sort of upset
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that this one looks kind of watery
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in comparison to this one, right?
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Because usually with coffee,
the more you extract,
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the darker the coffee looks, right?
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We don't know what that
means for flavour, right?
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Colour and flavour aren't
necessarily intertwined
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when it comes to stock.
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Stock number one
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Plenty of clarity of flavour.
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Let's try our clearer looking stock, which
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makes me nervous it won't
have the strength of flavour.
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Shouldn't have worried about that.
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That just keeps going.
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Okay, that is a lot.
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That is a lot more intense.
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It's just packed full of
flavour, almost overwhelming.
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It's not as kind of wonky as
I would have thought, right?
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It's not like suddenly it's
all leeks or it's all carrots.
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It's still actually pretty balanced.
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It's just a lot more intense.
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Now, there are I think
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some pretty interesting
implications from this
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and I think there is a path forwards.
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We'll talk about that after a short ad
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[549]
So, really there's no question
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that this stock has a lot more flavour.
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And, kind of out of interest,
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I kept some of the vegetables
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that you would usually discard
at the end of stock making
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before it would typically go
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in the compost or food waste or whatever
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and I was kind of curious,
how would a carrot taste?
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Is it gonna be an empty lifeless husk
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or is it gonna taste good?
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Is it gonna taste like a carrot
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just cooked in a bit of stock?
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That's basically delicious,
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Plenty of carrot flavour left,
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some nice stock flavour in there too.
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It seems completely wild to me
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that in the process of stock making,
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you'd be happy discarding
the vegetables in this state.
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I don't wanna say that
this version is better
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but it is unquestionably more efficient,
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and food is not limitless in supply.
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It costs money.
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It takes up resources to produce
it, to get it to our homes.
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If we're throwing it
away in good condition,
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if we're throwing away flavour,
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that just doesn't make sense to me, right?
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The whole process of stock making is
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about extraction of flavour
to use somewhere else.
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We're not doing an efficient
job with traditional recipes.
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So how do we take this forwards
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into our kitchens, into our homes?
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What's the practical outcome
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of this slightly bizarre experiment?
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One, if you make stocks
regularly and you own a juicer,
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you have to try this.
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I would say as a starting point,
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half the amount of vegetables
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that you would typically
use for an amount of stock.
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Secondly, if you're making
some sort of meat-based stock,
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I see no reason that the
thinking should not apply there.
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If you are putting large
chunks of meat into a stock,
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I think that's being grotesquely wasteful.
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I think it might be an inconvenience
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but you're gonna get a lot more flavour
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by exposing maximum surface area.
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Be it beef, chicken,
whatever you're doing,
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I think the technique totally applies.
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Three, this is really Chris's point.
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Stock recipes to date have
come through hundreds of years,
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hundreds of thousands, if
not, millions of kitchens,
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it's been well iterated upon
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and our ratios of carrot
to leek to celery to onion,
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they're pretty well-understood.
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And yeah, I think there
may need to be a change
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and a kind of tweaking of that
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and the more people that test this,
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and share their experience,
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the faster that iteration will go.
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I'm gonna leave a link to
a Google Form down below.
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If you try this, if you
mess around with it,
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I would love to hear from you.
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What were your ratios?
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Just give me like carrots
as your 100% ratio,
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and then scale it up or down from there.
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For every hundred grams of carrots,
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how many grams of leeks,
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how many grams of onions did you use?
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And share that with me
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and hopefully enough people do it
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that we kind of get a
wisdom of the crowds moment,
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where we get a kind of giant opinion
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on what works really well
and I will share that
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after a month or two of data collection.
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Fourth and lastly,
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I think the world is full of opportunities
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for cross-pollination of thinking,
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thinking about this
through the lens of coffee
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was kind of interesting
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and took me on an interesting journey.
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An experiment that I hadn't seen anywhere
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or seen anyone really talk about
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that has, I think, very
interesting results.
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Maybe there are other things out there.
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Let me know what your thoughts are.
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What could coffee thinking
be applied to next?
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What weird little experiment could we run?
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I would love to hear from you
down on the comments below
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but for now, I say thank
you so much for watching.
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I hope you have a great day.
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