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Oh the simple pleasures! I love making stock! The simplicity, the aromas, the usefulness of the finished product, it is all such a delight. Anyone who has ever made real, homemade stock will probably agree that store bought stock is a joke. It cannot possibly compare to this glory.

Beef stock is the second most frequent stock that I make. For me it is a little less convenient than chicken stock, since I often buy whole chickens and, therefor always have a supply of chicken bones and cuttings with which to make stock. Beef stock requires beef marrow bones, which I have to actually buy special. Now, there are some cuts of beef that include bones, and some of them even have marrow in them (like Beef Chuck Arm Steak). If you use these cuts of beef often and save the bones, then you can make your stock with those. Since I do not, however, I must buy my bones from the butcher. So I make it a little less often, but one of the things that I absolutely love about making beef stock is that the marrow bones render so much fat! I get five times the fat out of one batch of beef stock than I do out of a batch of chicken stock. Remember, stock is not the only thing you get out of making stock. That fat is just as valuable! Lately I have been more careful about the chicken that I use, and I have found that healthier chickens have much less fat than typical grocery store chickens, and their fat has a different quality. Typically, chicken fat, when cooled, has a texture similar to butter (ditto with beef fat), but the healthier chickens often leave me with fat that stays mostly liquid under refrigeration and even stays soft in the freezer! And since I get so little of it from the healthy chickens these days, I consider my occasional batches of beef stock a rendered fat jackpot.

This is another “non-recipe” recipe. Amounts are fairly arbitrary. When making stock you don’t usually count or measure your ingredients, but I do so for the purposes of this guide. If you do exactly what I do here, you will end up with perfect stock, but don’t feel that you must be exact. When making this guide, I ended up with about two quarts (liters) of beef stock. Your results will vary depending various factors.