Buzz
Making meat stock on the stove means you’ll be standing over a steaming pot, constantly skimming off strange, coagulated foam. It’s not ideal. Sure, you could skip the scum-scooping by using a slow cooker, but if you're stuck with the stove, there’s a quick fix to make this part of the process much more manageable.
While skimming meat scum from the broth itself isn’t too difficult, things get tricky when that scum covers all the other ingredients in the pot. The solution is simple: just hold off on adding your spices, aromatics, and vegetables until the meat has finished releasing scum and you’ve skimmed it all off. That’s all there is to it. I picked up this tip from the debut episode of Matty Matheson’s YouTube cooking series, Just a Dash, where he prepares a massive pot of oxtail pho. Matty says it best:
My typical stovetop stock routine has always been ‘throw everything in at once, skim lazily, and hope it turns out okay,’ so when I saw this technique in action, it was a total game-changer. Of course, separating the meat and veggies until all the scum is gone makes perfect sense—the fewer ingredients in the pot, the less surface area for the scum to cling to. It’s so clear now that I’m annoyed I spent so many years doing it the wrong way.
As we enter soup and stew season, don’t make the same mistakes I did: always make sure to remove every last bit of scum from the stock before adding any vegetables to the pot. Trust me, your life will be much easier.
