Almost any savory dish you cook with water will be tastier if cooked with a vegetable broth or meat broth. So throughout a week of cooking (and harvesting), I set aside less desirable parts of vegetables and bones to make broth when I have accumulated enough to make a pot or two. I often time the cooking in advance of making rice, or beans so I can cook those carbohydrates in the broth.
Making Vegetable Broth
The vegetables for broths can be any and all. For example, this week, I harvested broccoli heads. For the broth, I cut up the leaves and part of the tough stalk. I tossed in the tops and bottoms of onions, zucchini, and tomatoes from prior meals, as well as celery that I grow.I flavored the broth with salt, pepper, garlic, and thyme and let it boil gently for an hour.
Then, I strained it into a pot and cooked the pasta in that broth, after which I saved the broth to re-use to flavor rice in a few days.
I pureed the soft vegetables with parmesan cheese, butter, and more garlic for a sauce for the pasta. I love repurposing!!!
Making Meat Broth
Making bone broth is even easier. Every time I cook meat with bones, I plop the bones into a pot of water (just enough to cover the bones) and simmer it for an hour to draw out the flavor. I don’t bother to add aromatics at this time, but you can do so.
JWR Adds: Small bones — such as fish and poultry bones — only need to be cooked in a soup pot for an hour or two, to form broth. But many folks advocate that bone broths made with large bones should be cooked for at least 12 hours to fully extract minerals and other nutrients from the bones. This maximizes some of the key benefits of bone broth. Broths can be pressure-canned. But it is quite convenient to freeze them. Some cooks like to freeze them in ice cube trays so that they can later be used incrementally. Just freeze them in trays. Once they have fully solidified, they can be popped out of their trays and stored in contents and date-labeled freezer bags.
I am particularly fond of cooking beans and split green peas in ham broth.
During a busy harvest season, I cut and blanch tough leaves and stalks (the usual time is 2-3 minutes) so I can freeze them. Then, when I am less busy, I cook enough to can 5 or 7 quarts at a time (the sizes of my two pressure canners).
Most of the year for me and for many readers, making broth is an easy, passive endeavor on the back burner while doing anything else in the kitchen.
Enjoy!
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