I offer a comparison between Chef John’s and Babish’s recipes for demi-glace. Normally I find Chef John’s recipes a lot better than Babish’s but not this round.

TLDR; Use babish’s recipe. Maybe cut the carrots down to 1. Chicken feet is important no matter the version. Demi glace needs the red wine and tomato puree.

Chef John

Its very simple. Unfortunately I didn’t have veal bones so I cut it with 50% beef and 50% pork bones by mass. I let it go for 16hrs. I boiled down the stock unadulterated like his recipe states. I also added some chicken feet to add collagen to the mix.

At the stock phase, I noticed that it tasted a bit too sweet. Probably the carrots or the carmelization step.

Its not that good. Obviously I changed up the recipe a bit, but either the recipe or my changes aren’t that great. The mouthfeel is there, but the taste is not the best. Near the end of the reduction step I tried to see if red wine (an ingredient that babish uses) would help. It does. The red wine should be considered crucial to the functioning of this recipe.

Babish - Pressure Cooker

The pressure cooker recipe worked the best. Its short and the resulting stock is thick and flavorful. Following through with the demiglace produced the best results. Again, maybe cut the carrots down to 1 cause the sweetness is strong.

Babish - Stockpot

This didn’t work out great. Without the chicken feet (present in the pressure cooker version), it never develops enough collagen. Of course we can spike it with gelatin at the end, but eh. Adding chicken feet probably would help though. This recipe produces a much larger volume of stock with the tradeoff that it takes forever.

Chicken feet appears to be a must unless your bones have tons of tendon or whatever. There’s very little collagen in bone. There’s also just not a whole lot of flavor in bone so try to find bones that have some quantity of meat attached.