Every good meal starts with a good stock! I’ve made a habit of making stocks with whatever I have left over—veggies, veal, poultry, fish. It doesn’t have to be precise; if you’re missing some ingredients, it doesn’t matter.

For this one, we use fish heads and trimmings. You can use butter or oil as a base, depending on what you’ll be cooking with it. You can freeze it in different-sized portions for different occasions: just enough to make a sauce to go with a meal, or more to cook a whole dish, like my monkfish à l’Armoricaine 🙂

Fish Stock

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Servings: 1 litre

Ingredients Method Notes

Ingredients

  

• About 500 g fish head and bones, from any fish
• 1 carrot, coarsely chopped
• 2 shallots, chopped
• 1 whole garlic clove
• 50 g butter or olive oil
• 20 cl dry white wine
• 1 litre cold water
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 1 bouquet garni (see here)

Method

 

1. Wash the fish head and bones, then chop them into smaller pieces.
2. Melt the butter over a medium heat in a stockpot or casserole. Add the carrot and shallots and sweat gently for 5 minutes.
3. Add the fish pieces. Stir and sweat for another 5 minutes.
4. Deglaze with the dry white wine, scraping up the juices from the bottom. Reduce until almost evaporated, then add the cold water.
5. Add a few turns of freshly ground pepper, but no salt (never salt stocks). Add the bouquet garni and garlic clove.
6. Slowly bring to the boil, then simmer gently for 30 minutes, skimming from time to time.
7. Strain through a fine sieve into a stainless-steel bowl, pressing to extract all the juices. Strain again to remove any remaining impurities.

Notes

Just switch butter for oil depending on what you need it for.

Cool the stock, transfer it to jars and keep it in the fridge. Freeze whatever you won’t use within 24 hours.