The Case for Overnight Stock and the Life That Surrounds It
Michael Ruhlman, the James Beard Award-winning food writer, has spent decades arguing that home cooks overcomplicate stock. In this newsletter installment, he returns to one of his signature themes with a method so simple it borders on provocation: tear a chicken carcass apart, drop it in a pot with an onion and a carrot, cover with water, and put it in a 200-degree oven before bed.
I've long lamented the fact that most people think that making stock is an elaborate project. I suppose it can be—if you set out to make a gallon of brown veal stock (maybe one of the great miracles of the kitchen). But not for four cups of chicken stock from the carcass of roasted (or rotisserie) chicken.
The piece is part cooking lesson, part lifestyle letter, part love note to Greenwich Village in winter. Ruhlman toggles between these registers with the ease of someone who has been writing about food and life for a very long time, and who knows his audience well enough to assume they will follow him from stock pots to theater reviews without complaint.
The Science Beneath the Simplicity
What elevates Ruhlman's stock advice beyond the usual food-blog tip is his insistence on explaining the underlying chemistry. He breaks water's role in cooking into five distinct functions, then zeroes in on the one that matters most for stock: extraction.
Water pulls out the flavor from the chicken meat. Water extracts the flavors and sugars from the onion, carrot, and bay leaf. Water turns the protein collagen—which bones, cartilage, and skin are made of—into gelatin, which makes the liquid nutritious and gives it body.
This is Ruhlman at his most useful. He is not simply telling readers what to do. He is telling them why it works, which means they can adapt the method to their own kitchens without needing to follow a rigid recipe. His observation that stock can be overcooked -- that water will eventually pull bone fragments and disintegrate vegetables, which then absorb the very liquid they were meant to flavor -- is the kind of insight that separates a cooking instructor from a recipe aggregator.
Try not to boil your stock. It will be clearer and cleaner tasting because the boiling emulsifies fat and other impurities into the stock. That's why the 200˚F oven is the perfect stock-making device.
He offers three variations of increasing refinement. The simplest is a one-step overnight method. His own preferred version separates the bone extraction from the aromatic simmer. His wife Ann's version adds a leek. The escalation is gentle and unpretentious.
From Stock to Meal
The second half of the cooking section fans out into applications. Ruhlman rattles off half a dozen uses for the finished stock -- egg drop soup, tortellini en brodo, escarole and sausage soup, a pan sauce built right in the roasting dish -- before landing on what he clearly considers the crown jewel.
Nothing beats Jean-Georges's Thai Curry Soup. Warning though: you'll need to find galangal, Makrut lime leaves, and lemongrass.
There is a slight tension here. Ruhlman spends the first half of the piece arguing that stock is effortless, then recommends a recipe that requires a subway trip to Chinatown for specialty ingredients. The pivot from "anyone can do this" to "trek to Bangkok Center Grocery on Mosco Street" is charming but undermines the accessibility argument somewhat. Not everyone lives near a Chinatown, and galangal does not appear at most suburban grocery stores.
Snow Day as Narrative Device
The newsletter shifts gears into a portrait of a specific Sunday in New York City under two feet of snow. Ruhlman and Ann spent the morning in bed with the physical New York Times, ate bagels and scrambled eggs with gruyere, then caught a matinee at the Minetta Lane Theater.
What a glorious New York day we had last Sunday, lying in bed till noon, the bed covered with sections of the actual New York Times. Talking, doing puzzles. A bagel and some scrambled eggs with grated gruyere.
The dinner that follows at Minetta Tavern reads like a catalog of downtown indulgence: grilled Island Creek oysters, enormous marrow bones, the Black Label burger, a Grand Marnier souffle. Ruhlman names their host, spots a fellow theatergoer from the matinee, and walks home through snowy Greenwich Village streets ticking off the cross-streets by name. It is deeply specific writing. Whether that specificity functions as evocative detail or inadvertent exclusion depends on the reader.
We arrived home from San Miguel, Mexico, a week earlier; today cartels were burning up resort cities and people of San Miguel were ordered to shelter in place. Our car was not on the street and so would not be buried in the snow. A tree fell on our neighbor's car, smashing its windshield.
Ruhlman is aware of his good fortune and says so directly. The juxtaposition of cartel violence and windshield damage is striking -- a brief acknowledgment that comfort is not universal, followed immediately by a return to the pleasures of a well-stocked kitchen and a bolognese planned for the next day.
Theater, Books, and the Curated Life
The final sections cover cocktail recipes (a mezcal rickey for a tequila-preferring friend), theater reviews (six productions mentioned, from a Joyce adaptation to a data-ethics drama), and book recommendations contributed by Ann, whom Ruhlman refers to as The Promiscuous Reader.
The theater commentary is brisk and opinionated. Ruhlman dismisses the Elevator Repair Company's staging of Ulysses with cheerful finality.
Let's just say that we are now officially done with Ulysses—never have to think about it again, or wring our hands for never having finished the novel. Done and done.
His film recommendation of the Moroccan road movie Sirat is more enthusiastic, and he closes with a characteristically warm endorsement of the musical duo the Bengsons.
The links section ranges from a New York Times piece on the inexplicable habit of backing cars into parking spots to the origins of curling stones on a volcanic Scottish island. These inclusions feel tossed off in the best sense -- the kind of things a well-read person shares over dinner, not items curated for algorithmic engagement.
Bottom Line
Ruhlman's newsletter works because it makes no attempt to be only one thing. The stock instructions are genuinely useful, grounded in food science, and presented with enough flexibility that both beginners and experienced cooks will find something to take away. The lifestyle material surrounding those instructions is unapologetically personal -- a portrait of a specific kind of New York life that some readers will find aspirational and others may find a touch insular.
The cooking content alone justifies the read. The overnight oven method is one of those techniques that, once learned, quietly improves dozens of future meals. Everything else is context -- pleasant, well-written context that reflects a writer fully at ease with his audience and his subject.