Beef Stock Rebound?
Maureen Doherty, of Atlantic, Iowa, makes stock by roasting meaty beef bones, then simmering them in liquid for many hours. This produces plenty of stock—but also several pounds of leftover meat. Not wanting to be wasteful, she wonders: Can this meat be used in other recipes?
Meat rendered while making stock often is discarded, as the cooking process extracts most of its savory richness. But this leftover meat is still fine to eat—you just have to compensate for its flavor deficit. The easiest solution is to douse it in a bold sauce, be it a bright tomato sauce or a deeply savory gravy. For example, the Mexican culinary canon offers many approaches that can transform long-simmered meat. Try making it into salpicón (a tangy salad of shredded beef and vegetables) by tossing the meat with a spiced vinaigrette and serving the mixture in tacos or atop tostadas. Or treat the leftover meat like machaca (a type of dried, shredded meat) by cooking it with scrambled eggs and topping it with salsa. We also like it served in a cream sauce with popovers—a recipe recently recreated on Milk Street’s My Family Recipe, our new television program on Roku. For that recipe, go to 177milkstreet.com/jf23-popovers.