The quick answer: If you’re not cooking with homemade stock, maybe it’s time to start. You can’t find a better, or healthier value.
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Falling for Soup
The leaves are falling as the evening air turns cooler, so this week the beautiful wife yearned for soup. We started with my Potato Onion Soup (recipe to follow), and moved on to Split Pea Soup with Ham Bone (I providently had some stashed in the freezer).
Soups are traditionally made with stock, but when you cook with a bone, you don’t need to add stock. My Split Pea Soup recipe starts with a ham bone and includes the stock ingredients of mire poix (carrot, celery, and onion) plus the traditional flavors (bay leaves, thyme, parsley).
Through fall and winter, you can build a simple but delicious meal around a pot of homemade soup. Anyone can cook delicious soup. Soup fits perfectly with the values of Word of Wisdom Living: It makes an inexpensive meal, has only healthy ingredients, is delicious, and makes everyone smile when they enter your kitchen and sniff the fragrance. It takes a little work to make soup, but if you make extra you can freeze some for that night when you’re too busy to cook.
Taking Stock
Stock is the base for many soups and because you’re likely to have a turkey carcass sitting on your counter after Thanksgiving dinner, this is a good time to talk about making your own stock. Homemade stock is cheaper than the stuff in the store and tastes lots better. It’s also way healthier—you get a lot of nutrients out of cooked bones. We try to keep some in the freezer, from Thanksgiving into the spring.
The famed French chef Auguste Escoffier claimed that stock was everything in cooking. By tradition, soup made from stock will heal whatever ails you. Chicken soup is the only remedy proven to shorten the duration of a head cold. Stock is rich in nutrients and low in calories.
Stock is rich in minerals from the bone, amino acids, gelatin from the cartilage, and other nutrients. Gelatin has a long tradition in healing and also serves as a thickener; my stock was surprisingly thick. The minerals extracted from the bone, mainly calcium, are believed to aid bone building. In addition to all the nutrients, stock makes sauces, soups, and stews tasty. For more about stock (broth), see here.
Several years ago the beautiful wife had a sore hip joint that persisted for months. She finally saw an orthopedic doc who found nothing visibly wrong but suggested that glucosamine and chondroitin supplements were helpful to some. This wasn’t proven science, the doctor pointed out, but thought it worth a try. She tried it and within a matter of weeks the pain went away. Bone broths are natural sources of chondroitin and glucosamine so there may something to the claimed benefit of stock for bone health.
Healthy Change #45
This week’s Healthy Change is simple and delicious (and a recipe is included below):
Please comment: Got a favorite soup recipe, perhaps a family treasure? Share your best soup recipe.
Making Stock
It’s ridiculous to put my name on this recipe because people have been making stock from bones since the Stone Age. But I did. You can use any kind of bones, but we mostly use cooked poultry. This recipe is based on the carcass of a Costco rotisserie chicken with most, but not all, meat removed.
At Thanksgiving, we scale this up to make use of our turkey carcass (crushed or broken to fit the pot), limited only by the size of our biggest pot.
Skip’s Stock Recipe
Ingredients:
- 1 chicken carcass (try the Costco rotisserie chicken)
- 4 qt. water (Enough to cover the carcass; about 1 qt. per pound of chicken, original weight)
- 1 yellow onion, sliced
- 2 carrots, chopped in ½” slices
- 2 celery stalks, roughly chopped
- 2 bay leaf
- 1 tsp thyme, or equivalent of fresh thyme
- 3-4 sprigs of parsley (optional)
Directions:
- Place carcass in pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil and simmer gently 1 hour.
- While carcass is cooking, prepare mire poix (onion, carrots, celery stalks). Add to pot when hour is up, along with bay leaf, thyme, and optional parsley. Cook one more hour. (Note: Salt or pepper is not added to stock; it’s best to add seasoning when the stock is made into soup.)
- Remove and discard the carcass. Pour the liquid through a strainer to remove cooked ingredients.
- Pour the stock into 1-qt. plastic freezer containers, or 1-qt. zip-lock freezer bags. (I used glass bottles previously but couldn’t keep them from cracking in the freezer.)
- Refrigerate if used within 2 days, or freeze up to 2 months. When stock is refrigerated it will become thick, almost like gelatin.