Homemade Soup Stock – Recipe
Today I will introduce you to the first step of making a homemade soup, which is making homemade soup stock.
Soup stock is the basic liquid part of the soup, to which you add all the other ingredients necessary to create your chosen kind of soup.
You can prepare a vegetarian soup stock, or a meat soup stock.
Vegetarian soup stock is made by simmering your favorite veggies, with added oil or butter, to enrich its flavor.
Meat soup stock requires either portions of actual meat, or bones with some meat on them.
My favorite (least expensive) meat soup stock is from the carcass of a leftover roasted whole chicken, or turkey, plus the flavorful leftover basting pan juices.
If you have been discarding these parts, you are throwing away the best base for a homemade soup stock.
Another great idea for meat soup stock is the shank bone from a baked ham, with some snippets of meat still on it, or the cut away bone from pork chops, leaving only boneless fillets for the main course. I usually do not prepare my soups with beef stock.
Ingredients
- 4 quarts of cold water
- 1- 1.5 lbs meat with bone (ham shank, 2 chicken wings plus breast bones, bones cut away from 4-6 pork chops, 1 chicken breast, or 1 carcass of a whole roasted chicken, or 1/2 carcass of a whole roasted turkey).
- 1 Tbs. salt
- 1 medium onion, whole
- 2 stalk of celery, cut to large chunks, crosswise
- 2 medium carrots, cut to large chunks, crosswise
- 1 parsley root ( optional)
- 3 garlic cloves, whole
- 2 bay leaves
- 6 peppercorns (whole black pepper grain)
Instructions
- Fill a 6 quarts soup pot with 4 quarts of cold water, and set it on a stove top.
- Rinse the meat and bones (if using raw meat), and add it to the pot of water.
- Add salt, peppercorns, and bay leaves.
- Cover, and turn the heat to high, until the water begins to steam.
- Turn the heat down to medium, and bring it to a low boiling point.
- Using a large serving spoon, skim and discard the frothy mixture accumulating on the top surface of the water, until almost all gone. (This will make your stock nice and clear).
- Lower the heat to simmering, place a lid (partially covered) over the pot, to prevent the liquids from excessive evaporation, and from steaming up your kitchen.
- Let it summer for 1 - 1.5 hours.
- Add chopped vegetables, whole onion, parsley root, and garlic cloves.
- Simmer 30 minutes longer.
- Add more salt, if needed.
- Strain the stock over a strainer, into a clean container.
- Cool off, and store.
Notes
You can store the soup stock in the fridge for a couple of days, if you plan to use it for soup, otherwise pour it into zip lock freezer bags, and freeze it for later use.
If I plan to cook soup the same day as the stock, I add the whole onion in step 3, and strain the stock in step 8. While the stock is cooking, I chop ( into dice size pieces) all the veggies required for the type of soup I am making, and add them to the stock right after straining it in step 8.
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