Our freezer always has at least a few bags of frozen homemade stock: chicken, beef, clear fish stock, fish stock for making boullabaisse. When you need to cook a delicious soup quickly, or you want to make risotto, or couscous, or stew, or sauces, broths have many uses, we pull broth from the freezer.
Making homemade broth at home costs practically nothing and requires almost no effort. It has become a habit for us, which I will share with you.
So, first of all, you need to get used to seeing broth option 🙂 Yes yes 🙂
Broths are made from bones, i.e. what is left after cutting the meat for other dishes, from vegetables and herbs. Restaurants use imperfect vegetables for broths, all those cubes, strips that do not meet beauty standards and do not fit on the plate, but are nothing but the same, high-quality and fresh vegetables.
We make broths at home in the same way, when there are still products suitable for the broth.
For example, we cook a steak with a bone from high-quality, aged meat. After the meat is cut away, you’re left with a perfect, grilled bone that’s still full of flavor and nutrients. Such a bone is the perfect base for beef broth, from which you can make a delicious beetroot soup later, when you want.
Or we bake chicken. At lunch, we divide who likes the most, who gets the thighs, who gets the chicken breast, and usually, after eating, we still have the back, the carcass from the cut breasts, and where are all those cooking juices in the tin. Everything goes into the pressure cooker and turns into a fragrant chicken broth. So, we cook broth.
Homemade broth
Ingredients
- Onions
- Garlic
- Carrots
- Celery, leeks, paprika, other favorite, preferably firm vegetables (chicken, parsley roots, celery roots)
- Black pepper, bay leaves, herbes de Provence or other favorite dried herbs
- A little oil
- Bones and trimmings of meat or fish
- Water to cover
Instructions
- If you have one, cook everything in a pressure cooker. Broth is tastier the more flavor, nutrients and aromas are absorbed into the liquid, and this takes time. The longer you cook, the tastier. Cooking in a pressure cooker not only speeds up the process, but no goodness evaporates, all the aromas remain in the pot.
- Cut all the vegetables you are going to cook as small as possible. Much finer than you would normally cook in a soup. We don’t need the vegetables to stay tasty, they just have to give everything to the broth. Cut the onion, garlic, carrot, other vegetables you have. Suitable for leeks, celery, other favorite root and firmer-textured vegetables. Save tomatoes, zucchini, potatoes and other fast-cooking vegetables for soup.
- Heat the oil in the bottom of the pressure cooker and fry the spices and vegetables, stirring every time. First, add black pepper, a few bay leaves, Herbes de Provence or other dried herbs you like, and when the aroma spreads, add the onions and lightly caramelize them.
- Then fry until carrots, peppers (if you are boiling) start to turn yellow, and add bones, pieces of meat, everything from which you will make broth.
- Add water to cover and boil.
- We start cooking according to the instructions for cooking grapefruit, i.e. we cover it, then we wait for the pressure to build up, then we reduce the heat to minimum and let it cook for a long time. For a few hours at least, and sometimes longer.
- When the meat that boils in the broth becomes completely tasteless, it means that everything has already been given away.
- We turn it off and leave the pot to cool. This preserves all the aromatic substances.
- A well-boiled broth is clear and does not need to be clarified in any other way.
- When the broth has cooled to room temperature, strain it carefully, without shaking the pot too much so as not to disturb the sediment. We divide the broth into ziplock freezer bags, write down the date of production, what kind of broth it is, and freeze it in the freezer.
Those who tried the recipe say…
We’re waiting for the first approved cooking experiences for this recipe. Yours could be the first!