Best, Fast, Easy- Soups

Thoughts

Soups

I love soup.  There is something about broth that makes me happy.  In the movie Braveheart, after Brian Cox’s character adopts the orphaned WIlliam Wallace, Brian Cox tucks into a bowl of soup.  I mean it could be stew, but I think it must be soup.  The reason I believe that it is soup is because after a particularly satisfying bite followed by a dipped bread chaser, BC grunts a satisfied and impressed grunt.  It is something primal.  That is both how I feel and the sound I make when I get into a particularly well executed soup.  

If you are thinking, “this dude has a crazy soup fetish.  I mean soup is mushy, and salty and has the flavor of a drying wet shoe.”  You might be right about the first part, but the second part tells me that you’re doing soup wrong.  Soup from a can tastes weird (((to me) a disclaimer I add as to not run afoul of the soup powers that be) being drown in a vat of viscous, slithery chicken gruel and the last thing I feel being inhaling a hard, pink booger of denatured chicken flesh, is a nightmare of mine I just invented. )))  Soup is home made and broth is sorcery.  

And before you retort I make my soup and it is just ok, I would ask that you pull out a spoon and take a dose of the boxed broth you are using.  Go, I’ll wait.  Now, throw it away.  Thank god your soup was better than that right.  There are better broths to buy than others.  Some are even good (don’t throw the good ones away).   But if they are good, you are going to pay for it.  A box of decent broth will likely run to the tune of $6 or $7.  The more ridiculous stuff is going for $9, $10, even upwards of $16.  That, friends, is dumb.  Often these are labeled as “bone broth”.  But what then are the other broths made of?  What even is broth?  

Broth is a savory (not sweet) meat, vegetable and meat, or vegetable tea.  Simmering the ingredients infuses water to make a medium for soups and stews, flavor sauces, or use as a cooking liquid.  

So what is stock?

Pretty much the same thing.  

So synonyms?

No, technically there are differences.

What are they?

It’s not really important.

Tell me anyway. 

Sure.  Stock is cooked longer than 2 hours.  Stock must have bones but can have meat, while broth must have meat but can have bones.  Stock is left unseasoned.  

So, bone broth is stock?

Ya got me.  I suppose that if you use bones but cook it for less than 2 hours and add some salt then it’s not. 

Wait, this doesn’t matter.  

See above. 

Regardless of the nomenclature, make your own broth.  It is perspective altering.  Also, it is super easy.  Put ingredients in water and simmer.  That is it.  I use the electric pressure cooker.  It saves time and it doesn’t mean leaving a burner going all day.  Make the basic chicken soup below, with homemade broth, and tell me you don’t groan like a scar-faced Brian Cox.

P.S. I do keep boxed broth on hand.  I like Kettle and Fire.  I only buy it when it’s on sale.  It will drop 40% or more and when it does I grab a few boxes.  It’s not homemade but it tastes like food, which is how I like my food.