Soup stock

I'm not sure why making soup stock at home is such a mysterious process to many people (including myself, up until recently). Maybe it's the gourmet-ish reputation, the pickiness about clarifying and straining out particles, the fact that it can be bought in ready-made cans and cartons so therefore it must be difficult to make. (Tricksy, tricksy Campbells!) But it's not finicky food; soup is probably one of the most basic ways to squeeze every last drop of nutrition out of your food, as broth can be made with scraps that would have otherwise gone into the garbage or compost.

The first step is to save the scraps. If you're not going to use them the same day, freeze them in an airtight baggie or tub.

Meat scraps such as bones, gristle, dry end slices from roasts and other 'inedible' leavings can all be used. My mother used to use the picked-clean bones from a turkey or chicken roast, or the central bone from a ham. You can use raw scraps if you have time to boil them long enough that they get cooked through. Poultry giblets and necks work well for this.

Veggie scraps can include anything that you aren't cutting up and eating. The stringy rooty ends of onions are great, even if they still have papery skin attached. If you've had fresh garlic on the shelf too long and it's gone a bit dry and rubbery, use those too. Carrots that are limp and dehydrated but not moldy or slimy can go too. Woody stem ends from kale, broccoli, and asparagus are all fair game. Your imagination and your tastes are the only limitations with veggies. Just make sure you know if any bits of the vegetable in question are actually toxic and should not be used in food (such as the green stems and leaves of carrots).

Please note that you don't have to use meat. Veggies by themselves make excellent stock. My favourite combination is kale, carrot, onion and garlic. For the longest time I avoided making veggie stock because I had just never seen anyone make stock with anything but meat. It's weird what kind of mental blocks we can set up for ourselves. Go figure.

The procedure is simple -- you need to boil the scraps in a pot of water until it turns into broth that tastes good. To make a more flavourful broth, use more scraps for the amount of water you have, and cook them longer. You can add salt during cooking, or just put salt on the table so that people can adjust it to their own tastes. If there are any pieces of stuff that you don't want in the soup at the end you need a way to remove them.

A meat bone can just be lifted out with tongs, and you'll have lots of little meaty shreds floating around in the soup. Vegetables tend to cook down to the point where they're disintegrating, which will make for a cloudy and nutritious broth. Fancy cookbooks will tell you to tie the scraps into a bag made of cheesecloth, and boil the bag. You can also use a metal steamer basket; just submerge it instead of keeping the water level below its floor. Failing that, you can pour the broth through a strainer into another pot after it's cooked. These last two are my favourites, as they remove big pieces of not-tasty stuff like onion paper, and keep all the nutritious soup sediment.

That's all there is to it. I haven't tried freezing stock after cooking it, because it takes up more room in the freezer; I tend to freeze the scraps and use what I need to make a pot of soup for immediate use. If you've got other things you want to throw in the soup, do so. Meat should be cooked for a long time in soup. Veggies, pasta and grains, and most dry legumes can be cooked in the broth until you like the texture. (Be careful with some beans -- kidney beans are toxic when undercooked, so they need to be cooked until they're soft enough to mash with your tongue.)

I think I should write about beans next. Stay tuned.