Glace de Viande (Meat glaze)

Valz Note: This takes 2 days to make and a lot of cooking time. However, it is totally worth it. You basically end up with the equivlant of home made OXO cubes that make OXO a salt block. You can through 1 little jelly square into anything you make – gravy, soup, stew, spaghetti sauce – and the flavour of your dish will be significantly improved.

Ingredients

  • 10 to 15 pounds meat scraps, bones and fat. (See first tip below)
  • 2 large onions, sliced
  • 2 large carrots, peeled and sliced
  • 2 large ribs celery, cut up
  • 6 sprigs parsley
  • ⅛ teaspoon thyme
  • ¼ teaspoon savory
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 12 whole peppercorns
  • Cold water

Preparation

DAY I

  1. Rinse the bones and scraps, put them in a roasting pan and roast them at 375 degrees for an hour or so, turning them over occasionally to brown on all sides. Add the onions and carrots and roast a half hour more, or until they, too, are brown (but not black).
  2. Transfer the contents from the roasting pan to a large stockpot (about 20 quarts). Rinse the pan carefully several times. Scraping to loosen the caramelized particles. Add the water from each rinsing to the stockpot. Then add all the remaining ingredients and cover everything with cold water to a depth of one inch. Do not add any salt.
  3. Cover the stockpot, bring it to a boil slowly, reduce it to a simmer and cook it for 4 hours. At the end, strain off the broth into a deep pot (about 12 quarts), using a chinois or an ordinary strainer lined with damp cheesecloth. Cool quickly and refrigerate overnight. Discard the solids – or feed them to the pets.

DAY II

  1. In the morning, remove the hardened cake of fat from the top of the broth, leaving no particles behind. Discard the fat – or save it for french frying.
  2. Bring the broth to a boil and boil it down, uncovered, over high heat until it is reduced to about a pint of viscous, brown syrup. Depending on your stove, the process will take from one to two hours, approximately. (See the second tip)
  3. Pour the syrup into a clean ice cube tray (with the dividers removed) and put in the refrigerator, not the freezer, for six hours or more.
  4. Remove the meat glaze from the tray by prying up one end and pulling it out (it will come away cleanly). Cut it into three strips lengthwise and into cubes crosswise. Bag the cubes in plastic and store them in the freezer till needed.

Tips

  • Use any and all bones and scraps, fat or lean, cooked or raw, from beef, veal, chicken or pork. Beef should predominate, and knuckle bones yield lots of gelatin, but you can achieve decent meat glaze with 15 pounds of almost anything. Do not, however, use cured meats (too salty), lamb (too strong), smoked meats (too pronounced) or (as far as I’m concerned) even turkey (duck and goose are all right). It is possible, of course, to go out and buy 15 pounds of beef and veal bones and make superb meat glaze. But it is unnecessary. Simply keep a meat glaze scrap bag in your freezer and add all relevant leavings until you have accumulated enough for a batch.
  • In boiling down the broth, you will find that it goes through four stages. In the first, it simply bubbles at its own level like any other soup. In the second, however, it becomes viscous enough to make a ”head” of fine froth that will rise precipitately and possibly overflow the pot. During this stage, therefore, keep an eye on it. The third stage is reached when the broth becomes more viscous still and makes rather larger bubbles that do not rise so high. And in the last stage, the ”head” disappears, the bubbles become very viscous indeed, and the danger of boiling over is replaced by the danger of boiling dry. Needless to say, through all the stages, the level of the liquid goes down, the salinity goes up, the color deepens and the flavor grows more rich.

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/10271-glace-de-viande-meat-glaze