Recipe: Making soup stock from stuff you’d normally throw out
Ingredients:
- Bones (ex: chicken carcass, ham bone, beef rib bones)
- Water
- Optional: Bits and pieces of vegetables
- Optional: Bits and pieces of herbs
- Optional: Pan drippings from roasts, fried sausage, fried bacon
- Optional: Dribs and drabs of sauces and spices (think leftover packets from take out food)
Directions:
- Throw your bones and whatever veggies, herbs, drippings and leftover sauces/spices into a big pot full of water. Don’t get too carried away with sauces/spices. One or two complimentary flavours is plenty.
- Bring water to a boil then reduce heat to simmer. Simmer 1 to 3 hours. The longer you simmer, the more flavourful your stock will be.
- Strain stock with a pasta strainer and store in whatever containers you have on hand in the fridge for about a week or in the freezer for 3 to 6 months. Leave 2” or so room in the container as the broth will expand (like ice cubes do) when it freezes.
- Eat broth as is, use to make soup or use instead of water to make things like rice or quinoa.
- Mom reuses her bones twice (makes two batches of broth from each chicken carcass).
- Note: You can use fresh veggies like I did, but my mom just keeps a container full of vegetable peels, onion skins, pan drippings and herb stems in her freezer for making stock whenever she has enough bones.
- Note: Don’t use “brassicas” — broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage (they wreck your stock)