Broth Best Practices

Always keep emergency broth in the freezer

We love our broths. You can easily make a delicious rich broth from pretty much any kind of meat. We try to stick to meat on the bone, which tends to be a bit fattier. With broth on hand, you can quickly turn it into a quick meal. For example, you can heat it up with some noodles to make noodle soup. You can eat it with rice. For these reasons, we always seem to keep some broth on hand in the freezer. In this blog post, we’ll share some best practices for making broths.

"You can do this for anything!" - Mom

Ingredients 

• meat, such as

  • poultry

    • chicken

    • duck

  • red meat

    • pig's feet

    • pork bones (e.g. 扒骨 or 同骨)

    • oxtail (or other beef bones)

    • goat

    • lamb

    • venison

• ginger

• salt

• vinegar

Steps

You can make a great broth from nearly any type of meat. Boney parts of the animal (e.g. ribs, feet, calf) have a lot of good fats that are great for soups. For red meats, it is required that you first follow the Cleaning Meats post to remove the layer of blood and odor before stewing. For poultry this is optional.

After you have cleaned the meat, start by heating a wok with oil and salt. Add some ginger slices when the wok is hot. Stir fry for 15 seconds.

Then add the meat and stir fry for 30-60 seconds.

The meat should be browned by this point, but the goal is not to fully cook the meat. Now add whatever flavors you want to the soup. This can include rice wine, salt, sugar, soy sauce, etc. If you have vegetables (e.g. daikon radish), you can add them here too. Now add boiling water along the sides, enough for your broth.

Cover the wok and bring everything to a boil. If there are floating oils, be sure to discard those.

Ew.

Now transfer to a slow cooker and cook on high. If you don’t have a slow cooker, can you can cook on the stove on low heat.

For chicken and other poultry, cook for 30 minutes. If you have a bigger chicken, then it might take 45 minutes. For pork, the soup will be ready in about an hour. For softer pork, simmer for longer.

When the broth is done cooking, add more salt to taste.

You can eat or freeze the broth once it’s done. Enjoy!