These days I spend probably the majority of my blog-reading time on blogs about food and cooking, and as I’ve gained confidence in my own taste and technique, I’ve started doing proportionally more eye-rolling at pretentiousness.
One topic that’s almost guaranteed to be obnoxious is Which Time-Saving Products Should Be Avoided Because They Are Not Authentic Enough, and perhaps the most widely-derided such product lately has been packaged chicken broth. I’ve even seen recipes say you should use water rather than canned broth, if you don’t have any homemade stock available.
Here is what I think: that’s stupid. I make a fair number of things that are a lot better with chicken broth than water or vegetable broth - soups and risottos, primarily. Sometimes I have enough mushroom scraps to make a nice mushroom stock, and that’s good in risotto, but it requires more than one meal worth of scraps. And simple broth-based soups like white bean and kale really benefit from additional flavor. (For things like roasted red pepper soup or lentil soup I’ll make a quick vegetable stock from what I’ve got in the crisper drawer, and that works fine.)
Is homemade stock better than canned or boxed (which I generally prefer)? Sure. But that means you have to (1) make and (2) store homemade stock. In order to make chicken stock, you have to have a chicken carcass. I would say that in the past four years (the time I’ve lived in my current apartment), I have bought and prepared two whole chickens. So I have made homemade chicken stock twice, each batch providing enough for maybe a few weeks’ worth of cooking, depending on what I was making regularly. It was good, but honestly not that much better than the boxed stuff I usually buy at Trader Joe’s. Certainly not better enough to make it worth roasting a chicken every month.
(I have come to the conclusion that I just don’t really like chicken. Whenever I try a version that is supposed to be particularly flavorful, it turns out that that means it tastes more… chicken-y. I have no particular objection to boneless skinless chicken breast, but if I want bland protein, tofu is a lot easier to cook, and generally I don’t want bland protein at all. So if I were to roast a chicken regularly, I’m not sure what I would do with all the parts I didn’t make stock from, plus it’s kind of messy.)
I could potentially make a whole bunch of stock at once, maybe after a dinner party or something, but where would I put it? My freezer is usually full of leftovers I’ve portioned out for healthy, tasty eating later. (Also meat that actually has flavor, and all those mushroom scraps.)
I think decent packaged broth is a great compromise on taste, convenience, and non-wastefulness. And hey, at least it’s not bouillon cubes!