We will be going over stock and broth making. The major difference between the two is whether the addition of meat is included with the bones. When you get bones you want to get five times the amount of vegetables for the stock. Now in this case I will be using ham shanks for my broth and the basic stock mixture of vegetables of celery, carrot, and onion. You can use mushroom and bell peppers as well. Equipment wise you will want to get something called cheese cloth so you can do a final strain without getting a lot of chunks in the stock. If you have no bones from a recent roast then you can use something like in my case ham shanks. Roasting the bones, meat and vegetables would result in making the stock a brown stock. Now the color whether it is white or brown just signifies if things have been roasted.

Using the ham shanks this will be a brown pork broth. Starting cooking the bones or shanks in this case in pot with a little oil to brown the meat and bones while you cut the vegetables. It does not need to be the best cutting if your a little self conscious about it.

After cutting your vegetables toss them in with the bones to give them some color. When some time passes you want to add your water to the amount of ten times of the mass of the bones. So if you add 1lb of bone you want 5 lb veg and 10 lb or 10 pints since a pint of water is equivalent to a pound. Get everything in the pot after your roasted what you want and let it simmer until two thirds of the liquid is left.

As I was making the stock the roommates needed to eat so they decided to get something else going.

Line your strainer with the cheese cloth before draining the stock. The cheese cloth will catch the smaller pieces of matter left in the stock the strainer will miss. Let your stock cool and you should have a fat cap form on the after it cools down as well as the stock turning in to a bit more like jello. That means that the gelatin has been pulled from the bones and that is what gives the stock a quality that separates it from many things you can buy now a days.