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Comment by martijn_himself | Hacker News Reader

One thing that definitely resonates with me is his mention of sauces when he explains the differences between star ratings.

Quite often when I visit a great restaurant I find its a sauce that lifts a dish from the good to memorable. I always thought that was because of the stock made from scratch. This is quite hard to replicate at home- store bought stock cubes add very little depth of flavour to a dish and making stock from scratch, well, unless you have a lot of time on your hands its not going to happen.

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Buying a rotisserie chicken and throwing it in an instant pot with some carrots, onions, celery, and enough water to cover it (and some thyme, rosemary, and bay leaves) for an hour or so has surprisingly good results, and is fairly easy to do. Pour the liquid through a strainer. I pour it into ice cube trays and freeze it, so I can just grab a couple of cubes when I'm making a pan sauce or soup.

It's easy enough to start with an uncooked chicken, or better yet, wings for the high collagen content. When you start with a rotisserie chicken, you've a lost a lot of the chicken's flavor to the roaster's drip pan.

I prefer the flavor from the already-roasted chicken in my stock, but yeah a raw chicken works just as well. Just needs more cooking time in the pressure cooker. My main point was that making stock at home is a lot faster if you have a pressure cooker.

"mention of sauces when he explains the differences between star ratings"

That's pretty much my view of bacon sandwiches - without "brown" sauce they are pretty good, but with "brown" sauce they are the food of the gods.

You can make and freeze demi-glace cubes. Cool trick I saw on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IERauv-k5wo

EDIT: Forgot to add, fish sauce also adds a lot of umami and depth.

If you live in a city, go find a specialty grocery store and ask them for stock and demi. They'll get you restaurant quality versions of both items.

That's some really good advice. I must give that a try, thanks.

>Quite often when I visit a great restaurant I find its a sauce that lifts a dish from the good to memorable. I always thought that was because of the stock made from scratch.

Or from knowing exactly what materials or procedures to add to the "school cafeteria" sauce your food service supplier delivers to make it work great with your dish.

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