The Single Ingredient Anthony Bourdain Called 'The Backbone Of Good Cooking'

It's truly hard to think Bourdain is gone. He was not only a fantastic chef and lover of food, he was a voice of humanity and kindness in a very fraught world. His ability to not only discover incredible cuisines but to showcase the generosity and hospitality of different cultures across the globe is something I will always cherish. That's why I love looking through Bourdain's old posts and quotes about anything and everything. His simple style almost has a poetry to it. In his book "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly," he deems stock the "backbone of good cooking." I think here, too, I agree with Chef Bourdain.

Stock is one of the easiest ways to enhance the flavor of any dish. Whether you're cooking lentils, rice, beans, or meats, all the amino acids and fats in the stock will seep into your food. As Bourdain pointed out, it's actually easy to make. We even have some advice on the best parts of the chicken to use for stock. You want to throw some leftover bones and veggies in a pot of water, bring it to a boil, reduce the heat, and let it simmer. You can also add spices, and it's a great practice to keep a stock bag in your freezer where you store discarded vegetable tips, onion skins, garlic, and other potential ingredients to use whenever you whip up a batch.

Anthony Bourdain and many other celebrity chefs, or even bakers like Prue Leith, have long argued that being a good cook isn't about natural talent or ability. It's about knowing what to do with what you have. It's partly why Bourdain's statement on stock is so strong, and why Bourdain holds such a place in our collective imagination. A good stock doesn't take a ton of know-how, ability, technique, or fancy gadgets, and it can also easily be adapted to create countless different flavor profiles. This could also explain his love for pho or Bún bò Huế, from his trips to Vietnam, both of which are noodle soups whose base is an incredible, fragrant, aromatic bone stock. Bourdain even described the latter as the "greatest soup in the world." 

But this seems to be the backbone of most excellent cooking: simple techniques, decent ingredients, and a little bit of patience. After all, stock isn't exactly something that can only be made by fine-dining professionals (unlike these 16 dishes). The best cooking lessons Gordon Ramsay taught us also aren't particularly complicated, further proving that Bourdain's words will always be relevant because he appreciated the simplicity of good cooking.