Kosher Blog

I was just looking for this at the Whole Paycheck this morning and I ran into a ton of stuff: Better than buillon was one brand name (not kosher) and another few claimed to just be dehydrated chicken, beef or vegetable broth. I bought my spike seasoning and went home but I thought for sure I might find something. I know people who use the imagine stuff to great advantage, but when I am in the right mode, I just stick every bone I’ve got into the freezer and then on a night when I won’t be leaving home, simmer those carcasses. I freeze the results in ice-cube trays and then just save them to pop into soups etc. as needed.

The Imagine broths are obviously a compromise, but the No Chicken Broth is really very good. I regularly use it and the vegetable broth for cooking.

I hope there’s a market for real kosher broths, but people have to be willing to pay for the difference.

Hi, I read your RSS feed via LiveJournal.

Imagine makes a good line of boxed soups, and most if not all of them have an OU hechsher. Available in the natural foods aisle.

It’s not just kosher soup — every canned soup out there is made from dreck.

I always make my own. That way you can tweak the flavours, make light or dark stocks and most importantly, you know what goes into it.

I know your question was about meat stocks, but I still have the pareve ones on my mind…

The Organic Gourmet makes a really nice paste. It stopped being hekshered a few years back. Inquiries led to the response that their certifying rabbi had retired and, being in some far corner of Germany, they had difficulty finding another authority. I’m still looking for a good replacement for a dairy French Onion Soup.

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the Pacific vegetable broths. These are also available at Whole Foods, and sometimes Trader Joe’s. They are MUCH better than Imagine and also come in 4-packs of smaller servings that are perfect for use in recipes that require 1-2 cups of broth.

The one other decent kosher-certified soup that I know of are the Geffen ramen-cup-of-soups. They very much are what they are, but they are MSG-free… and come with a spork!

We don’t do it–my mom does–but I’ve always been told that the best thing to do is to make a lot of soup when you have the time and freeze it in ziploc freezer bags.

Just to clarify: Imagine’s vegetarian broths are all under the OU, last I checked. The meat-based broths are treif.

Ziploc bags are good, but if you put them on the wire racks of the freezer shelf, the bottom bag will freeze around the grates - a big pain. What’s also good to do is freeze leftover chicken soup/stock, etc. in ice cube trays. Pop out your cubes and store THOSE in a ziploc. Each is about 3 tablespoons.

Jabbet: you say that like chicken-fat & MSG are bad things!

OK, I’ll admit that home-made & fresh-made are better than canned any day, but I’m not opposed to using the canned stuff. I don’t have enough room in my freezer for my own broth. The bigger problem for me is the salt content - it can throw the flavors of a recipe off. Levana Kirschenbaum makes most of her soups with water - “If you’re using the most delicious ingredients, why would you need broth?”

As far as MSG goes, you should read Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay “Why Doesn’t Everyone in China Have a Headache?”, in It Must Have Been Something I Ate. He posits that most MSG sensitivity is imagined, or at least due to something other than MSG. Did you know that Parmesan Cheese has the second highest concentration of natually ocurring MSG? Right behind Kombu Kelp.

The Steingarten article is interesting, but I have reason to doubt the conclusiveness of the study he cites. (I seem to remember that the statistical sample was very small, though I don’t have the numbers here just now.) I’ve had MSG reactions in the past without knowing that I had eaten MSG, usually because it was in something that I didn’t expect to contain it. Worth noting that, if I’m not mistaken, a dish made with kombu still has a much lower level of glutamic acid than most dishes flavored with pure MSG or onion soup mix (=MSG, salt, spices).

That aside, the article doesn’t touch on the fact that food made with good ingredients just tastes better than food made with bad ingredients covered up with MSG.

I’m not saying it’s conclusive - just food for thought. I have the book handy, though. :)

In one study, Of 61 subjects who identified themselves as MSG sensitive, 18 reacted to MSG with no false positives to a placebo. In another study, it was estimated that about 1% of the American public are MSG sensitive and show symptoms after consuming an oral dose of 3 grams of MSG.

I’m not denying anyone’s symptoms based on this data - I’m just presenting an opinion. And there are 3 divisions in the discussion - good food made without MSG, bad food made with MSG and good food made better with glutamates, such as parmesan cheese and tomatoes making dishes tase better.

Tomatoes and parmesan are cited as foods with strong umami tastes, but I think the responsible chemicals were ones other than glutamate. (I’m not sure about the cheese, but am reasonably certain about the tomatoes.) The point was that the two substances complement each other.

Umami-flavor is a product of glutamates & inosinates. Tomatoes & Parmesan are among the richest in glutamates. See for yourself. Gluatamates and Inosinates have a synergistic affect on each-other, so foods with both of them (Japanese dashi broth being the common example) have something like 16x the flavor-enhancing ability.

I have the same problem. A lot of soups that I want to make call for chicken or vegetable stock. An idea I had though is to go into a takeout place and just buy ready made broth. like from a mauzone or something….

DebraG,
Freezing soups/broth in ziplocks is easy — just put a cookie sheet or cutting board on the rack, freeze, then stack up neatly. This also saves a lot of space.

I also am a saver of turkey & chicken carcasses for broth. Depending on how the orinal bird was cooked, the flavor can vary. For purists this might be a problem — I enjoy the variety.

For beef broth, I found another trick. I have a great recipe for french roast — sear the roast, place on a bed of tons of onions and a cup of red wine, top with onion soup mix, and cook forever. This yields a wonderful, strongly flavored broth from all the liquids released from the roast and the onions. Whatever is leftover after serving, I skim and freeze — great as a soup on its own with added rosemary, or as an ingredient. While I know the addition of the onion soup mix is a chemical addition, it is a much less proportion than using soup base alone. My friends think I am so extravagent, serving roast for shabbos, but they don’t know that with this added bonus, I avoid having to cook soup for a week or two after.

BS”D

It’s so easy to make your own stocks. At the supermarket where I shop I got (kosher) chicken bones which made the best stock. I also roast onions and carrots until some char is on them and use them too!

_The New Basics_ has a recipe for homemade chicken bouillion cubes — 4 lbs. of wings and backs makes 16 cubes. I plan to try my hand at this some time.