liquid broth vs cubes

[TabulaRasa]

Stock melts are okay in a pinch.

[rrah]

Originally Posted by TabulaRasa

We keep jars of soup base on hand for when we don't have stock or what we do have needs a boost.

But bouillon cubes and granules are mostly salt, little other flavor.

This is what I use: soup base that is stored in the fridge. I'll use the broth that comes in the resealable container for holiday cooking--extra stock in the stuffing or additional stock for gravy.

[gguerra]

Originally Posted by Threestep

Just read the ingredient list.

Ditto on this. The cubes are the worst.

These are the ingredients for the Knorr Chicken Bouillon Cubes and that is one of the better brands.

Salt, monosodium glutamate, hydrogenated cottonseed oil, chicken fat, hydrolyzed soy/corn protein, dehydrated mechanically separated cooked chicken, dehydrated chicken meat, dehydrated chicken broth, autolyzed yeast extract, dehydrated onions & parsley, lactose, water, colour, spices & spice extract, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate, citric acid, tartaric acid, hydrogenated soybean oil and sulphites.

The liquid may not be much better.

[silibran]

I don’t use boullion cubes. Read the ingredient list and decide if you want to put so much sodium and dextrose in your body.

I do use Whole Foods reduced sodium chicken broth. It adds a very slight flavor to a dish. There are some new products out now, calling themselves bone broths. But I haven’t tried them. They might add more flavor to a dish.

For robust chicken flavor, make your own broths using chicken carcasses, or whole chickens. I like to use a cooked carcass with three or four chicken wings. I keep some in the freezer for this purpose. My best results have happened using a slow cooker, but you can get a good product using a pressure cooker.

Directions for doing this abound on the web. It is not hard. Save bones from a chicken dinner and proceed. Or you can buy a chicken and make broth from it. Freeze for use later.

[Quietude]

Originally Posted by saibot

I usually use the jarred concentrate, aka Better than Bouillon. I particularly like their vegetable broth, but the chicken and beef are all right too.

These are exceptional. Even Cook's/ATK is nuts about them.

Yes, they're highly engineered food, but so is nearly everything else outside the vegetable bins.

[Jkgourmet]

Originally Posted by Medtran49

We buy the Kitchen Basics unsalted broth in waxed cardboard/paper boxes so no tinny taste. Looking at the ingredients, KB seems to be the best non-organic chicken broth we can find. We also buy their other broths, but I still have a problem with the beef broth. Every single one on the market has a funny aftertaste to me, so, if we are having something like French Onion soup where the beef broth is front and center, I suck it up and make my own, then freeze.

.

100% agree. I use the KB STOCK almost exclusively. I keep some granules around but rarely touch them.

[Kayekaye]

I use cubes when I have run out of my own stock.