Lately, I’ve been craving and making a lot of soups using concentrated stocks. Rather than make and then reduce the stock, I lazily do a small scratch batch, but I moisten/submerge with a quart box or two of commercial for the long simmer.
I’ve taken to liking doing this because the resulting liquid ends up richer, is fresh, and I can use it then and there in my soups.
Anyone else cheat this way?
PS. Apologies if there’s another thread on this–I stopped searching after reading 10 old threads on chicken stock.
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BarneyGrubble
(Fan of Beethoven and Latina singers)
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There’s a video on YouTube by Chef Jean-Pierre on doing exactly this, I think.
There is zero chance that I will lug home boxed or canned broth, and spend my limited shelf space on it, when Better Than Bouillon is excellent, affordable, and takes up little room.
I did at Thanksgiving this year, because I was making a duck but wanted duck/chicken stock and didnt have any chicken parts. The resulting stock was delicious but quite salty (the box stuff I used was not low sodium). Fortunately it was easy to adjust by not salting the gravy, stuffing, etc in which it was used, but definitely something to keep an eye on if you do this.
My go-to for almost all broth-based dishes. I love the variety you can get - for my hot pot I usually combine the BTB mushroom and roasted garlic broths for a vegetarian friendly base.
Since we usually cook the Thanksgiving turkey on the grill, there tends not to be a lot of broth/drippings for gravy. So I got four boxes of Pacific turkey broth, and I swear I had to cook them down to the equivalent of one box to get any flavor. But yeah, I do that all the time. Not with the Pacific brand, which I seem to remember got low ratings in a test from I don’t remember what site. I do like Better than Bullion as an adjunct sometimes, but Knorr makes a similar product that I think is a lot better.
If you have access to Wegmans, they make a bone broth concentrated paste that is waaaay lower in sodium than BTB reduced sodium. I can’t paste a link but this is it:
