How to cook chicken broth - recipe with step-by-step photos

Surely you have encountered the fact that after cooking, meat loses its structure, becomes dry and loses its richness of taste. People often associate this with the quality of raw materials, and few people understand what the real reason is.

Most housewives don’t think twice about it and add salt at will when necessary. Some at the beginning of cooking, others during the cooking process, and others at the very end.

But in preparing meat products, every little detail is important. And it seems that such an insignificant detail as the timely addition of salt can greatly affect the taste of the dish.

Proper chicken broth. Recipe

Chicken broth is a storehouse of beneficial properties.
It is used for colds, respiratory diseases, and can even cleanse the lungs of a smoker a little. It has a beneficial effect on people with gastrointestinal diseases. Chicken broth helps strengthen bone tissue and improves the structure of muscle fibers. It contains B vitamins, calcium, magnesium, copper, phosphorus and other valuable substances, which have a beneficial effect on the body as a whole. Chicken broth is not difficult to prepare. But in order to get a clear, rich, aromatic broth, the way it should be, you should take into account several rules.

The classic broth recipe uses the whole chicken, but individual parts or just a soup kit from any supermarket will do. It’s not worth using just the breast: the meat may turn out tough and the broth may not be rich.

• Chicken – 500 gr
• Onion - 1/2 head
• Carrots - 1 pc.
• Celery - 1/3 tuber

1. Rinse the chicken and place in a pan

Pour water so that it covers the meat. If you want the chicken to be tasty, add salt right away. If you prefer a tasty and clear broth, add salt at the end of cooking

2. Put on fire. Let it boil, drain the water, rinse the chicken, add clean water and put it back on the fire. Make sure that the water does not boil too much; only small bubbles should form on the surface. This will allow the broth to remain transparent. To do this, promptly remove the resulting foam.

4. Wash and peel the onions, carrots and celery. Cut into several pieces and add to the broth when the water boils.

5. Boil the broth for 60 minutes.

After cooking is complete, the vegetables can be discarded. Everything that was valuable in them has already gone into the broth.

The broth is ready. It can be consumed in its pure form, or used as a base for soups or added to other dishes.

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Some cooking tips

To make the broth truly special, you should know the basic cooking rules.

• Chicken meat does not affect the taste sensation as much as the correct selection of vegetables and spices. Everyone is already accustomed to adding onions and carrots to the soup. But, in addition to this, you can use parsley, and also do not be afraid to add a little bell pepper, garlic and celery.
• Potatoes enhance the taste characteristics of the broth, adding more satiety and nutrition to it. Light soup is usually cooked without potatoes.
• As for spices, you don’t have to limit yourself to salt. A very tasty broth is obtained with the addition of dill, paprika, and turmeric.
• A clear broth is considered the most aesthetically pleasing. It depends on the chicken itself. For soup you need to use only meat with bones, no need to add offal. But if you want to add a chicken heart or gizzard, it is better to cook them in a separate pan and then add them to the finished broth. Transparency is affected by cooking time. The soup will become cloudy if cooked for a long time. There is no need to stir the soup during the process, just remove the foam from the surface.
• Cook chicken soup over low heat.
• If the broth turns out cloudy and you want to achieve transparency, then you need to strain it a couple of times through cheesecloth. Adding whipped egg whites to the broth will also help. In any case, this is only a matter of aesthetics - transparency does not affect the taste in any way.

To learn how to properly cook chicken broth, watch the video below.

How to make clear and tasty chicken broth with your own hands.

Well-prepared chicken broth restores strength, pleases the eye and lifts your spirits. It’s not for nothing that doctors include it in the diet of patients after surgery.

To achieve the best results in preparing broth and appreciate all its qualities, I have compiled a cheat sheet

for users. Don’t judge strictly, I’m not a culinary guru and I’m just sharing my personal opinion.

Ingredients for chicken broth:

The best broth will come from second-grade chicken. (when visiting a store, look in the frozen section) or a soup set (neck, wings, skeleton, legs, skin).

Taste and richness

The broth is supplied with bones, skin and fat. Broth made only from chicken pulp, especially lean breast, will never be tasty. The richness of flavor can be enhanced by pre-baking the chicken ingredients under the grill in the oven.

Aroma

Vegetables are given to the broth. A small amount of carrots and onions enhance the flavor of the chicken. Celery, garlic, ginger and herbs enhance the flavor but overpower the flavor of the chicken. But you shouldn’t add more onions and carrots: onions make the broth very “oniony,” and carrots make it too sweet.

Color.

Onions and carrots baked until blackened in a dry frying pan give
a golden color
.
Don’t be afraid to burn the surface to “emergers” – the broth won’t smell burnt. The golden brown color
comes from pre-baked chicken ingredients under the grill in the oven until golden brown.

Transparency.

The main condition is to ensure that the broth boils very slowly during cooking over the lowest heat.

How to cook:

Place the ingredients washed under running water in a saucepan, fill with cold water to cover the bones, place on the stove and turn on maximum heat. Bring to a boil. Do not cover the pan with a lid during cooking.

Remove from heat and pour off the first broth along with the foam. The procedure helps improve transparency and get rid of unnecessary chemicals.

We wash the pan and remove any foam that has stuck to the walls. Cool the bones and rinse under running water.

Put the washed bones back into the pan, pour cold water to the required volume, and put on the fire. Bring to a boil, skim off the foam, add a pinch of salt (to speed up the release of the foam), add vegetables, reduce the heat to minimum, cook for 40 minutes, periodically removing the foam. We take out the bones and vegetables, strain, and get a clear broth.

Important:

To defatt the broth,

let it cool, then put it in the refrigerator until a crust of fat appears on the surface, remove it for further use in preparing other dishes.

To get the broth,

which hardens into jelly (as in aspic), either add more bones, or increase the cooking time to 4-5 hours.

If the broth still turns out cloudy

, it can be lightened. To do this, cool the broth completely. Beat 2 egg whites, mix with broth and place on low heat. Bring to a boil without stirring - the whites will rise to the surface in a “cap”. Immediately turn off the heat and carefully remove the protein mass with a strainer. Let the broth sit for 20–30 minutes and carefully drain without sediment.

To obtain a broth with perfect transparency,

for example, for consommé, cool it to room temperature, freeze it in the freezer and then set it to slowly thaw, placing it on a thick strainer or gauze in several layers.

Over-salted chicken broth.

Usually broths are not salted when cooking. The only way to reduce the saltiness is to cook the broth separately without any salt at all and then mix it with the over-salted one.

With celery

This aromatic, easily digestible and low-calorie broth is an extremely successful combination of vegetables, spices and white poultry meat. It's incredibly good as a stand-alone dish. But if desired, it will be an excellent basis for preparing a delicious dietary soup. We’ll look at when to salt chicken broth and in what order to put the ingredients in the pan a little lower, but for now let’s decide on the proportions of the main components. To cook it, you will need:

• 2.5 liters of filtered drinking water.
• 600 g chicken breast.
• 50 g celery root.
• 1 juicy carrot.
• 1 medium-sized onion.
• Salt.

The pre-washed chicken breast is separated from the skin and placed in a pan. Coarsely chopped root celery, pieces of carrots and a whole unpeeled onion are added to it. All this is filled with the required volume of water and sent to the switched on stove. The boiling liquid is carefully removed from the foam that has appeared, added some salt, covered with a lid and left to simmer over minimal heat. After about forty minutes, remove the meat and vegetables from the pan, and the finished broth is filtered through a sieve and used for its intended purpose.

Amount of salt

This is a rather individual question, especially if the soup is being prepared for all family members. One may find it under-salted, while another may find it over-salted. In addition, salt may be contraindicated for certain health conditions. Nevertheless, it is important to know some rules with which the broth will turn out perfectly salty.

Experienced housewives always add all the spices by eye, but not everyone knows how to do this. Therefore, beginners should use the formula: half a teaspoon per liter of soup. To keep the risk minimal, it is better to add salt in stages, while tasting the broth.

Some people prepare soup without salt, replacing it with aromatic herbs and other spices. You can add pickles or sauerkraut to the soup if salt is not used for one reason or another.

General recommendations

Middle-aged poultry, aged from two to four years, is suitable for preparing such dishes. Such a carcass can be kept in boiling water for a long time and it is from it that a very aromatic broth is obtained. Moreover, it can be used not only as a whole, but also in parts. To obtain a dietary broth, it is advisable to take fillet. If you want to make a richer broth, you need to use legs or wings.

Depending on the recipe, add unpeeled onions, celery, carrots, parsley root, black peppercorns or bay leaves to a saucepan with bubbling liquid. As for at what point to add salt to chicken broth, culinary specialists have still not come to a consensus on this matter. Some are sure that it is better to do this immediately after the water boils, others - twenty minutes before turning off the fire. The most interesting thing is that both of these options are correct. But in the first case, you will get a rich broth, and in the second, juicy and tasty meat.

Once you've figured out when to salt your chicken broth, you need to figure out what to do to keep it clear. To do this, you need to cook it over the lowest heat, taking the time to periodically remove the resulting foam using a special slotted spoon. For the same reasons, it is prepared in a loosely closed pan, and after turning off the stove, it must be filtered.

The duration of the process depends on what kind of bird is used for cooking. So, broth from a one and a half kilogram store-bought carcass is prepared in about 1.5 hours. It only takes sixty minutes to cook half a chicken, soup set or chicken legs. And the process of preparing fillet broth will take only half an hour. Homemade chicken will take the longest to cook. It needs to be kept in a pan of boiling water for about two or three hours.

What to do if the soup is too salty?

During cooking, a force majeure circumstance may arise - excessive saltiness. In this case, they always say that it is better to under-salt than to over-salt, because the first problem is easy to fix, but problems arise with the second. But in fact, this situation is also easily solved - there are several proven methods that will help any housewife eliminate such an oversight.

• Sugar. It is the opposite of salt, so it makes sense to use it. But you shouldn’t throw several pieces at once. It's better to start with one, then wait a minute and taste the soup. If it is still too salty, then you should add another piece. Usually two lumps of sugar save the day.
• Using rice cereal. Another effective way. You can throw in rice cereal, but if you don’t want rice in the soup, you can take cheesecloth, pour the cereal in there, make a small bag and put it in the pan. This way, the rice will absorb excess salt, but will not end up in the soup.
• Water. If you don’t have any lump sugar or rice on hand, then regular boiling water will come to the rescue. You need to pour some broth out of the pan and add new clean water.
• Carrots, greens, potatoes, noodles and cabbage will help remove excess saltiness

Nutritional and energy value:

From dried mushrooms

The best basis for preparing such a fragrant decoction would be fly mushrooms, butter mushrooms or honey mushrooms. You can buy them at the market or collect and dry them yourself. Before you figure out when to salt mushroom broth, you need to know what you need to cook it. In this situation, you should have at hand:

• 2 liters of filtered drinking water.
• 150 g dried mushrooms.
• 1 root parsley.
• Salt (to taste).

The sorted and washed mushrooms are soaked in cold water and kept in it for at least three hours. After the designated time has passed, they are placed in a colander, rinsed again and placed in a pan filled with the required amount of clean, cool liquid. All this is sent to the stove, brought to a boil, supplemented with parsley root and cooked for about an hour. The finished broth is filtered, salted and poured into plates.

Turkey with spices

This spicy and extremely fragrant broth is usually used as an accompaniment to rice or unleavened noodles. To cook it you will need:

• 2 liters of filtered drinking water.
• 600 g turkey on the bone.
• 30 g celery greens.
• 2 buds of cloves.
• 1 parsnip root.
• 1 tsp. turmeric.
• ½ pod of hot pepper.
• Salt, nutmeg and fresh ginger.

The washed turkey is chopped into pieces, placed in a pan, filled with water, seasoned with cloves and brought to a boil, not forgetting to remove the foam flakes. When the meat is almost ready, add parsnip cubes, hot pepper rings, ginger slices, turmeric, herbs and nutmeg. Around the same time comes the time to add salt to the broth. When cooked, the bird becomes very soft, making it easy to separate from the bone. The broth is served in beautiful plates, not forgetting to put a piece of meat in each serving.

Tips for making delicious soup

• Opt for a saucepan with a lid. It will be easier to control the thickness of the soup. With the lid closed, the liquid will boil away more slowly. And if you realize that there is too much water, just open it slightly and the broth will evaporate faster.
• When cooking meat, do not add water to the brim. Remember that the pan must also accommodate vegetables and other ingredients.
• Identical pieces of vegetables. To ensure that the ingredients are cooked at the same time, cut them into equal cubes. Otherwise, it may turn out that some vegetables have turned into porridge, while others are still crunchy.
• Taking a sample. Towards the end of cooking - after adding salt and spices, be sure to taste the broth. Even if you cook according to a recipe that has received a lot of positive reviews. It is possible that the amount of spices will not be suitable for you.
• If you want the soup to be transparent, bring the meat to a boil over high heat, and then cook over medium until tender.

Each housewife empirically chooses the time when it is best to salt the soup. Sometimes it happens that despite all the advice, a delicious dish turns out precisely because of its non-compliance. After all, over time, you begin to feel when and what ingredient to add. However, if you are just creating your own family home and are trying to gain as much knowledge as possible, these tips will greatly help you avoid making the mistakes that most housewives make.

Date: 08/13/2019.

Photo: nakormi.com

From duck

This aromatic and very nutritious broth can be served for a family dinner instead of the usual borscht or soup. To prepare it you will need:

• 1 kg of duck meat on the bone.
• 3 liters of drinking filtered water.
• 2 juicy carrots.
• 2 onions.
• 1 root parsley.
• Salt, bay leaf and spices.

Washed duck pieces are poured with water and placed on the stove. Half an hour after boiling, it is supplemented with chopped carrots, root parsley and onions. After another ten minutes, add bay leaf, spices and salt into a common bowl. All this is brought to readiness, and then filtered and poured into plates, not forgetting to put in each portion a piece of meat, previously separated from the bone.