Stock is one of the cornerstones of our civilisation, yet few households actually regularly make it part of their routine to create the stuff, preferring instead to harvest the supermarket shelves and pay up to $4 a litre for the privilege. Little attention has in fact been paid to the how much a regular stock habit can save you, as well as nourishing yourself and your family and making your grocery budget stretch further.

As I write this, I am chowing down on some delicious chicken noodle soup made from home made stock. The recipe took me 5 minutes to make (the much bigger chore was eating it, which involves around 10 minutes of audible slurping) and is something that I can easily squeeze into my lunch break or afternoon down time.

But chicken noodle soup is merely the fringe of the mullet. Hundreds of different recipe varieties can be created using the same stock recipe. Entire cookbooks have been composed on the back of a single stock recipe reused to perfection. Stock is also a fantastic flavour additive and can be used to make a huge range of recipes go further – everything from lamb kidney pie to chicken biryani.

Once you get into the habit of making stock, all of a sudden your cost per serving will plummet: add a handful of barley, a small cut of pumpkin, and you have a soup serving for less than 50 cents. The more stock you use in your recipes, the cheaper your shopping basket becomes.

The thing I love most about stock is it less a recipe than a habit that you follow through on whenever you have some leftover bones or veggies lying around. Let’s say you finish your roast and you’ve stripped the carcass for sandwiches: add your leftover vegetable peelings (carrot and celery are ideal for this), chop an extra onion, carrot, some celery sticks and add them all to a pot with some salt and pepper, then fill with water and bring to the boil. Once it boils, turn down the heat, and let it sit on the stove top for an hour and a half. Then pour the contents through a sieve into a series of containers and pop them in the fridge (or freezer if you’re storing them). The prep time? 5 minutes either side. The cooking time? Once you’ve turned it down from a boil to a simmer, an hour an a half, but during this time you can go, do and see whatever you want – you don’t even need to be in the same postcode while it’s simmering away.

I cannot stress this enough. While yes, the pot spends over an hour on the stove, the actual prep time you need to invest into creating up to 7 litres of stock each week is only 10 minutes. After a few tries, the process becomes so automatic that you can do it in your sleep.

Yeah yeah, I know, you can get all fancy by adding herbs and bay leaves and mixing up the ingredients – and if you work in a restaurant you probably will do that. But the above steps are absolutely suitable for the home cook, and still produce an amazing intensity of flavour. (One thing I do like to do, if you roast the meat with veggies, is to add half of the juices and veggies into the stock for flavour. I still find with this method you have enough juices to make a healthy amount of gravy and sandwiches.)

The next great thing about stock is just how much you can get from a tiny little carcass. I originally started out making stock in batches of 3 or 4 litres, because that was all the storage space I had at the time, but I soon realised that it was just as effective to use a larger pot to make as much as 7 litres of stock from a single size 16 chicken carcass. The difference? I added no extra ingredients, I merely increased the size of the container I was cooking in, and got a far larger quantity of stock with no flavour dilution whatsoever (so far as my unprofessional taste buds could tell).

Now, here’s where the financial magic happens.

So let’s say you feed 2 people off a $60 weekly shopping budget. A size 16 chicken can easily fit into that budget and as well as a roast and leftovers, can produce up to 7 litres of stock.

Each serving (of noodle soup, for example) would use around about 250ml. So from one carcass, you can create up to 28 additional meal servings with just a few extra ingredients required.

 

Of course – you do need other ingredients to make a varied and nutritious diet. Which is why I like to be conservative and say that stock recipes make your household shop go 20% further. It could well be more.

Suddenly, the economics of buying a weekly chicken or lamb to roast become much better.

If you do end up making 7 litres of stock per week, you need to ensure you have adequate fridge or freezer space, or at least a system for storing stock, otherwise your kitchen can get unruly.

I went through a phase where I was regularly making 7 litres of stock per week. This was a fun time for all concerned, and no doubt saved me a pretty penny, but it eventually took its toll on my psyche due to the immense and totally unnecessary labour involved in defrosting and circulating the stuff into new containers. Bad things happen when you defrost stock – it’s easy to underestimate how long it can take to turn ice to liquid under normal refrigerator settings (let alone the aberrant and quirky settings on our poltergeist-driven device). Failing to anticipate this can throw your entire meal plan off course and lead to painstaking hours attempting to thaw huge chunks of ice in the kitchen sink.

Over time I realised that I didn’t need that much stock, simply because our household wasn’t big enough to consume it in a few days. Taking the unfreezing work out of the equation was a blessing, as it allowed me to focus on creating a small pot of stock that gave us enough value and variety to get through the week. I nowadays make as little as 3 to 3.5 litres per week, far less than my stock heyday, but I am pleased with the results, and if the occasion ever comes where I need to feed a platoon I know I can rise to the challenge.

Large quantities of stock will be very valuable if you manage a household of 4-6 people and have adequate fridge space, or if you only eat meat occasionally and are happy to pop the surplus stock from the freezer into the fridge a few days in advance for defrosting before cooking.

Here are two out of the possibly billions of creative home kitchen uses for stock.

A super basic chicken noodle soup (takes 5 minutes, serves 2-3 people)

Add a dollop of sriracha sauce and some dark soy sauce to the bottom of each of the deep bowls

Heat up your stock on the stove top for 3-5 minutes until nice and bubbly

Total cost: about $1.70 for up to 3 serves.

Carrot soup

(uses about 1 L of stock)

Get 6 carrots, peel them and chop them finely

Peel an onion and chop it too. Put them in the pot with some olive oil and fry them down for about 15 minutes until soft.

Gradually add your stock. Bring it to the boil and allow to simmer for 20-30 minutes.

Take some of the carrot mixture out and blend in a food processor until smooth. Then add it back to the pot.

How much does stock save you?

Let’s say that you are diligent and use your full quota of stock each two weeks across a range of recipes, including soups, noodle dishes, curries, biryanis, risottos, and other dishes.

But wait, you say, making stock requires animal carcasses, and so is really only a good option for carnivores! Not so, as any vegetarian will tell you – vegetarian stock is available as well.

A great vegan version can be found here.

How stock fits into a complete, end-to-end, weekly cooking system

The great thing about stock is that it fits neatly into an overall system that, once you master the habit, can substantially reduce your food expenses, reduce your overall weekly food preparation hours, and help to make your lifestyle far more environmentally friendly.

Here is how it works.

You take a roast and make it according to the recipe instructions.

You keep your vegetable shavings (such as carrot peel and celery stalks) in a bowl and put it to one side for the stock.

Many roasts take around about one and a half hours to prepare, so at the same time as you make your roast, you pop in some whole pumpkin and some jacket potatoes for later in the week.

This has the effect of using up the heat in the oven at no extra cost and fills out the space in the oven.

After it’s done, you remove your roast and eat it. You also remove your jacket potatoes and pumpkin and store them.

The pumpkin can be cut in half, then loose flesh peeled or pulled off, and the seeds removed. (If you really want to, you can clean and roast the pumpkin seeds for an extra healthy snack.) The pumpkin flesh should be divided in half and stored in two separate plastic containers. These can be used as the base for a number of dishes during the week (such as pumpkin fritters, or pumpkin hommous).

The vege shavings and the bones or carcass from the roast can be chucked in a big pot and boiled down for stock. You can divide and store these according to the instructions above.

Once the veges have been digested, the worm farm system can produce vermicompost, which is an excellent fertiliser for a small fruit and vegetable garden, and can then be used to grow the produce for your next roast.