These stocks are just yeast extract water for taste with chicken residues for marketing. Yeast extract (or MSG, or e621) is the cornerstone of modern processed food. It replaces expensive processes and products aimed at improving taste with a cheap additive that attempts to approximate the traditional taste. Soups, meat products, stocks, potato chips, snacks, sauces, anything that's supposed to have an extravagant taste is generally just a bland tasting cheap scalable filler product with yeast extract for flavor.
And consumers love it. They like the 'punch' of yeast extract flavor in everything. They love the low effort, low price products.
I despise yeast extract. It leaves a noticeable aftertaste in my mouth that won't go away for hours. I'd much prefer if brands just stuck with MSG but for some reason every single type of chips other than plain salt is adding yeast extract around here.
I suspect that the aftertaste is one of the selling features for brands: if you take a bite, enjoy it, and then an aftertaste tries to settle in, you might be likely to go for another bite to cover it up and repeat that until the product is gone and you want more.
Yeah, I'm not too fond of it, either. I recently found chips with paprika flavor that only had potato, salt, paprika powder! They tasted wonderful. A friend of mine thought them 'boring' and liked the common ones with yeast extract more.
You can achieve that effect with salt, msg and/or marmite (depending on what sort of flavour you're going for). Inversely, there's things you can achieve with actual stock that you can't with any of those, mostly related to the texture.
If you don't know what's going on, it can be quite dispiriting to read about restaurant-style sauces, learn that one of the key ingredients is stock, and then fail to replicate the effect because the stock you're getting isn't the real deal. These days I just make my own stock (it's dead easy) and freeze it in ice cube trays for easy portioning.
Yes, it is for most people. A minority of people don't like it though for a variety of reasons, mostly taste. But for them (more expensive), alternatives are available.
Yes, per the article -- the reason store-bought stock (minimum water-to-protein ratio 1:135) never reduces to a gelatin (like homemade) is that the homemade has Much higher protein content.
It's hard to know what other dimensions of healthiness apply to homemade over store bought.
> Yes, per the article -- the reason store-bought stock (minimum water-to-protein ratio 1:135) never reduces to a gelatin (like homemade) is that the homemade has Much higher protein content.
How much of an effect on my nutrition will replacing the stock part of my typical recipe with water have?
I'd be highly surprised if it were at all meaningful. I don't add stock for nutrition, I add it for the taste.
It's been 20 years since I've heard "mouth feel", based on some food projects going on in the lab where I did my PhD. I don't think it was a new term then. Maybe it's bled into the world of internet foodies recently, I have no idea, but it's not a new term
I get you but I believe mouth-feel is more than texture, for example it's the crunchiness of crisps in your mouth, and temperature alone doesn't cover the coolness of menthol.
I certainly agree with you that a lot of pretentious long words are taking over from short words that do a perfectly good job, and it sucks.
Though your mouth is reporting good feedback on things that seem to have good nutritional value right? Of course you can easily confuse it (eg with lots of sugar), I just mean the distinction you're making might not be needed.
And consumers love it. They like the 'punch' of yeast extract flavor in everything. They love the low effort, low price products.