Cooking is a passion for a lot of people, and it has been since man managed to discover fire. We’re able to do so many different types of recipes with so many different types of ingredients that there is a whole world out there to keep on exploring day in and day out and luckily, a lot of people like doing so.
Chicken Broth
A huge favorite for most people is chicken: it tastes amazing, it’s cheap, it’s extremely versatile and it is actually healthy. The only thing that’s not good about it is that it ends, but that is also a fixable problem – just buy more! But eating chicken every day is not something that is healthy, or good at all.
Luckily, you can mix the flavor of chicken into the food just by making a stock, and then putting it into soup, sauce, or anything else you are cooking. For example, if you are cooking a vegetable soup and you add some chicken stock to it, you are going to be able to taste the vegetables as well as that amazing chicken base – your soup is going to be delicious.
When it comes to stock, a lot of people know about the basis of it. Stock is usually a liquid, flavored with whatever it was done with (in this case, chicken) that also has the flavor of vegetables in it. Usually, a chicken stop is made out of vegetable scraps, bones and meat scraps. These are all boiled and then allowed to cook for a little while so that the flavor in the scraps really comes out.
But then there is the broth, and a lot of people don’t know this, but there is indeed a difference between a chick stock and a chicken broth. They both start out the same way, with vegetable and meat scraps as well as bones simmered for a while, but then things change when a stock turns into a broth, and the different is incredibly small, but at the same time it is a huge difference.
Chicken Stock
A stock is usually just left at that: the scraps and the bones are simmered and then we’re left with the liquid packed with flavor and absolutely no seasoning. This is an amazing base for soups, creams and sauces since you can actually control the amount of seasoning you put into the final recipe.
When it comes to a broth, however, there is seasoning involved in the liquid already, and that makes it a little worse when it comes as a base for soups, creams and stocks, since it is already seasoned, it is going to be a lot harder for the food handler to be able to control the amount of seasoning on the final product. This means that it can easily be salty or have too much pepper, without the food handler being able to do anything about it.
This, however, doesn’t mean that the broth is worse than the stock, not at all. Even though the broth has seasoning and even though it isn’t as useful as a base for other dishes, it is good as a part of the final result for a lot of dishes. A broth can be used to make an incredibly delicious soup with vegetables, for example, where all you need to do is boil up some vegetables, add them to the broth and that’s it! The soup in this example would be incredibly healthy and, at the same time, incredibly delicious.
According to the old definition that separate these two, the one that used to be taught on most hotels and restaurants as well as some of the culinary schools around the world, is that the broth is made with meat, and the stock is made with bones. This might have been what used to be done back in the day, but in recent years the kitchen scene has gained a lot of versatility and as such, to make a good stock or broth, the best thing that can be done by the cook is the usage of both meat and bones, to get the best out of both worlds.
A store bought stock is going to be, well, store bought, and that has obviously got some consequences when it comes to the quality of the stock, and the broth if the food handler so decides. Anything you can buy on a store is mass produced and as such, it doesn’t really have the same love and attention as a homemade stock or broth. In order to get the best possible stock/broth experience, it is always best to make everything from scratch at home.
Even if the final result isn’t delicious at first, you should keep on trying and not yield to the convenience of store bought stocks. Not only will you be losing in flavor and texture, you are also going to be losing in nutritional value and in the experience of cooking something delicious by yourself.
To summarize, you should always make things from scratch yourself, and the main difference between a stock and a broth is the seasoning. To turn a good stock into a broth, all you need to do is season it with whatever you feel like you should, so that the final result is a formed ingredient that comes in the final result, other than a simple base that can be used to form the final result.