Very few urban dwellers are making their own beef stock these days. I think very few rural dwellers are, either, and I’d never have done it myself, either as an urban or rural dweller, if not for some very good friends who are very good cooks.

I’m not quite certain I have done it, actually, but I’ve been trying for the past few days in my garage summer kitchen. With a potful of bones and vegetable scraps simmering away on the stove, I’ve wondered and worried over this broth since last Friday. I started with just soup bones, cooked it for a day, read Julie Child, and then added some garlic cloves, carrots, celery and radish tops. I took it off once, strained some out, then put it back on, unsure of whether enough liquid had cooked away. I put in salt on Day 4. Finally, today I’ve strained and poured it onto freezer containers. It Is Finished.

I have no confidence in the final product, but am looking forward to taste testing. This whole thing started with foodie friend Brad, in Chicago, who first suggested I get beef soup bones back from the butcher when we processed our steers last fall. He assured me the effort in preparation would be well worth the reward. But the soup bones languished in the freezer ‘til last week, when my co-worker JD, another excellent cook and food enthusiast, promised to walk me through my first stock-making experience. His first lesson: expect your house to stink for several days.

So, I put the pot on the garage stove, opened the window, and let it cook. I didn’t think it smelled bad, but I had some visitors who did. But all the way in the back garden, I could smell it wafting out of the window. JD looked at it Saturday, Day 3, and turned it up. I didn’t realize it was to simmer in a bubbling sort of way, hence the several extra days of cooking. He also asked whether I’d boiled off the impurities first, which I hadn’t. He recommended straining through a cheesecloth when and if the broth was completed.

At the end of Sunday, I tasted the stock and decided it was quite too bland to have justified three days of electricity. I added the salt. Monday I checked in with JD, who avowed he never used salt, and told me stock should be bland. He asked whether I’d roasted the meat first, which I hadn’t. Roasting makes for a less bland stock. JD also gave me the excellent tip of throwing a tied bundle of parsley in for the last 45 minutes of simmering, to draw further healthy minerals out of the bones and into the stock. Since my parsley is still an inch tall in my cold frame, I skipped it this time, but think it’s a fascinating idea for the next go-round.

JD’s in a bit of an experimental phase with the soup stocks himself, having recently whipped some up, only to find it exploded in the the freezer. He’s trying wide-mouthed Ball jars this time, and I’m trying plastic freezer containers I inherited from my generous mother-in-law Rhonda, an accomplished canner who’s promised to walk me through that skill this summer. We’ll see how these work, and after they freeze, I’ll thaw some of my mine and compare with JD’s, both made with Circle M beef bones. Watch up-coming posts for an actual recipe from JD and a review of the stocks.