How to Make Bone Broth Soup: a Thanksgiving Tip from the Parent Powerline

How to Make Bone Broth Soup: a Thanksgiving Tip from the Parent Powerline
Wednesday, November 22, 2023 by Becky Cerling Powers

When my husband Dennis was in graduate school, we had a preschooler, a baby and very little money. I learned to stretch our meager family food budget by making bone broth soup from chicken bones after we had eaten a meal or two from the meat.

Dennis was intrigued to discover how tasty and cheap homemade soup was – so intrigued that he suggested we introduce our friends to the soup making process.

So, we threw a soup party.

We invited three other couples to look through their cupboards and refrigerators for any leftovers they thought might taste good in soup, and then bring their goodies to our apartment an hour before dinner would be served.

The day of the party, I baked bread and made bone broth from chicken bones, the meat from which had already fed our small family once or twice.

I let the bone broth cool, skimmed off the chicken fat, and set the fat aside.

When our guests arrived, the women gathered in the kitchen to inspect and deal with everyone’s contributions. We had rice, macaroni, and an odd assortment of various vegetables, as I recall.

We boiled the rice and pasta in the broth while we chopped vegetables and chatted.

I used the chicken fat I’d skimmed earlier to stir fry the vegetables. Then I dumped the veggies into the pot and served a meal of homemade soup with fresh homemade bread, enough for the whole crowd. It was great fun, and everyone was amazed to realize what a delicious meal we had concocted.

Soup not only feeds a crowd cheaply and nutritiously, it is so versatile you can make it with almost anything you have on hand. And you can easily modify the basic soup recipe for people in the family who have allergies and other special dietary needs.

On top of that, dieticians love it. It is beyond healthy.

Bone broth is rich in minerals like calcium, magnesium and phosphorus and it is very high in protein in the form of collagen, which promotes bone and joint health and the healing of wounds. It is especially good for women during pregnancy and while nursing a baby, because the rich supply of collagen aids the development of baby bones and joints.

Bone Broth Soup has four main parts:

First: broth. The first secret to making great homemade soup is learning how to make a nutritious broth by boiling bones in water to extract minerals, flavor and unrefined gelatin. You hasten the process when you add salt and a tablespoon or two of vinegar. Vinegar helps dissolve calcium and minerals from the bones, and salt draws out the juices. (The vinegar taste goes away as the broth boils.) When bone broth is properly prepared, it has more calcium than its equivalent in milk.

Broth can be made in enormous batches, but for the sake of flavor and nutrition, only make broth into soup one meal at a time. If you have a lot of broth, use what you need for your soup and freeze the rest to make more soup meals later.

Use whatever kind of bones your family likes.

Examples: chicken bones and carcass, turkey bones and carcass (after the whole turkey has been roasted and the meat carved off), hambone, ham hocks, oxtail, beef bones. Of course, you can boil bones with a lot of the meat still on it, but boiled meat doesn’t taste as good as meat that is roasted, baked or fried.

Second: “Filler” Filler gives the soup holding power. It is usually some form of grain or legume, like rice, noodles, dried peas or beans, lentils or barley. I call it “filler” because it’s whatever will fill up a teenager.

It’s easy to modify this ingredient for tailoring homemade soup to special diets.

One of our sons had allergies to legumes, potatoes, wheat and rice. I used barley as a filler when he was home for meals.

Third: Vegetables. The second secret to great homemade soup is to preserve the flavor and vitamin content of vegetables by chopping, sautéing (or stir frying) and adding them to the soup just before serving (instead of boiling them until they are limp and waterlogged and much of their vitamin content has been destroyed by overheating).

The exceptions are potatoes and dried beans.

Potatoes should boil 15-20 minutes in the broth before you add your other vegetables. Dried beans should soak for 12 hours. Then the soaking water should be poured off to make the beans less gassy in your tummy. After pouring off the soaking water, you can boil the beans along with the bones, if you wish.

Finally, seasonings. You can use salt, pepper, and whatever else your family likes. Look at soup and casserole recipes in cookbooks for ideas on combining seasonings. I usually stick to salt, pepper, and Mrs. Dash. Dennis likes to use lemon pepper. Sometimes we like to use curry. For curry soup, cook the curry spices in oil or butter in the frying pan for a couple minutes, then add in the vegetables for stir frying.

Homemade soup is easy to make from your prepared bone broth. Teens can easily learn to make it. And Thanksgiving is a great time to give it a try because you have a whole turkey carcass to experiment with.

Here is an easy recipe for making bone broth:

Pour into a slow cooker: 6 cups of water, 2 cups of bones (or the carcass of a whole chicken), a teaspoon of salt and a couple teaspoons of vinegar. Set the cooker on low heat and cook for 12 hours. (If you don’t have a slow cooker, you can use a big pot, get the water boiling, and turn your heat to low for 12 hours. But don’t let your water boil away! Keep an eye on the pot and add water when the liquid gets low.) Pour the broth through a colander or sieve and store the liquid in glass containers. Reheat for sipping or use as stock for soups and stews.

And here is a sample soup recipe:

Boil one cup of barley in two quarts of bone broth and one quart of water. When the barley is tender (usually in half an hour), chop an onion, 3 celery stalks, 4 peeled carrots and a zucchini.

There probably won’t be room in the frying pan to sauté all those vegetables at once, so sauté (or stir fry) the carrots and zucchini in a little butter or olive oil first. Stir them in the hot oil for only two or three minutes, until they are coated and slightly tender. Add them to the soup, then sauté the onion and celery chunks until the onion is clear. Add them to the soup, season to taste, and serve with crackers or croutons.

If you want meat in your soup, chop up whatever meat you cut off the bones before using the bones to make broth. Add the meat to the soup along with the vegetables.

Use with attribution only www.beckypowers.com

Becky Cerling Powers is the author of the nonfiction narrative, Laura’s Children: the hidden story of a Chinese orphanage and a parenting guide, Sticky Fingers, Sticky Minds: quick reads for helping kids thrive.

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