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