Two years ago Jennifer McGruther wrote The Nourished Kitchen to match her popular website. Her focus is traditional foods and classic techniques: broths, fermented veggies, raw dairy, all the things that people used to eat every day and now do too infrequently.
She has doubled down with her new book: Broth & Stock from The Nourished Kitchen. It’s a serious look at the subject with a wide discussion of techniques and an even wider display of how basic recipes can be used to fashion both pleasingly simple and richly complex dishes.
I’m hopeless about some culinary terms. I do get “broth” and “stock” confused. I wish broth was made with bones because the words both start with that “b” but, of course, that is wrong. Broths are made with meat, or veggies, but stocks, those deep rich stocks, are made from bones cooked over a long, long time.
The book has three primary parts:
- Recipes for basic stocks and broths
- Simple recipes using those stocks and broths
- Other dishes using the same slow cooking techniques from broth and stock making
For less than 200 pages, this is a long journey.
The broth and stock recipes are the ones you grandmother or great grandmother used. The very first recipe in the book is Whole Chicken Broth. Yup, one whole chicken cooked for 6 hours to achieve a densely flavored broth. Don’t worry, you do pick the meat off and it’s good for a few days in your fridge. Think chicken salad.
There are other broth recipes giving you a portfolio of serious ideas:
Chicken Food Stock [with instructions on how to prepare those chicken feet]
Chicken Bone Broth
Roasted Turkey Bone Broth [which you can use for Thanksgiving]
Long-Simmered Roasted Beef Bone Broth
Shellfish Stock
Roasted Mushroom Broth
If you think all broths are the same, then the recipes that follow may convince you otherwise. There is a difference in risotto made with a poultry broth versus beef stock. Sometimes, Jennifer offers a simple idea: the Morning Broth is just heated chicken broth with some garlic and parsley.
And the other end of the spectrum, there is a rich Turkey Soup with Root Vegetables and Wild Rice, made with stock from that whole turkey carcass left over from your holiday table. There are dishes here for using broths and stocks with poultry, meat, fish, and veggies.
The long and slow cooking techniques are used here for dishes where you are creating a stew, not a broth or stock unto itself. There is, for example, Beef Shak with Garlic and Basil and a Seafood Stew with Lemony Parsley Pesto. And sometimes there is a traditional dish where the broth just sneaks in — a Potato and Onion Gratin accentuated with the Long-Simmered Beef Bone Broth.
I know what you are thinking. Why bother? You can buy a can or a cube and have broth in minutes. You will, if you do that, have a liquid with some flavor. And a lot of salt. But you won’t have a real broth, a real stock. For that you need time, bones, and Broth & Stock. It’s worth every hour.