The Slapdash Cook

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I haven’t been doing my share of cooking lately. I bought J. a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and as a result have been enjoying a succession of soups, crepes and things flambe. However, then I spotted this homemade bouillon recipe on 101cookbooks.com. I have enjoyed multiple recipes off that site and really like the idea of homemade bouillon because we use broth all over the place. So I was looking forward to trying it.

Let me start by saying that, of course, I altered the recipe. For the 7 ounces of fennel bulb, I used part fennel stalks (having already roasted and eaten the bulb) and part mushrooms. I tried and failed to find celeriac at the farmers’ market. (I left it on the grocery list and J. dutifully looked for it at the store… in the vitamin section.) So instead of celery root, in went chunks of peeled Yukon Gold and sweet potatoes. Yellow onions went in instead of shallots. I used two roasted cloves of garlic and two raw, instead of three raw and no roasted. I just straight-up skipped the sun-dried tomatoes. And while I did use parsley, I felt cilantro was not right for a neutral, non-Thai and non-Mexican soup base. So out with the cilantro and in with some fresh tarragon and thyme. Oh yeah, and I threw in three or four tablespoons of nutritional yeast.

Perhaps most importantly, I used half of the salt called for. This was a point of contention in the comments to the original recipe, with a lot of people saying it seemed waaaay too salty. I was actually planning on ignoring this and adding all of it, but J. and our friend B. were hanging around tasting, and they told me to stoooooop! (B. did compliment the flavor, though, which is a big deal because he is a… choosy… eater.) The original recipe says the salt helps keep the bouillon paste from freezing in the freezer, so I resigned myself to making a big tub of frozen solid mass. Happily, it turns out that half the salt also kept it from freezing.

By the way, the seven-ounce vegetables tended to come out to 1.5 to 2 cups of veg, while the 3.5-ounce vegetables tended to come out to about a half a cup. But seriously, folks, a kitchen scale is well worth the minimal investment. I think I got mine for about $5. (And it doubles as a postal scale.)

Anyway, after all that drama, I ended up with a large, yet surprisingly compact, amount of bouillon paste. The trouble was, it didn’t seem to create much soup when I stirred it into hot water. Example:

It did taste like something other than salty, but it didn’t give me the brownish, savory oomph I’m used to from Better than Bouillon. And I had a ton of it. I had never had a bad outcome from 101 Cookbooks before, and I wasn’t all that psyched about tossing it all out. So I decided to run some experiments: blend the stuff into a more paste-like substance, and then see how cooking it worked out.

I thought I got it about as fine as it was gonna get in the food processor, so I decided to move it into the blender. This was a bit of a challenge, and not just because our blender has taken a beating lately thanks to Julia Child. The paste needs liquid to blend better, yet liquid in this context would defeat the purpose of bouillon paste. (A very small amount of olive oil might not be defeating, but it also might not help.) So I had to do a lot of coaxing with a rubber scraper. Here’s the finished product side-by-side with the original. The dime is there for scale.

And here they both are stirred into boiling water. The mug has the more finely blended version.

I thought blending it was better. But better still was cooking it a bit. Naturally, I used my very favorite appliance, the slow cooker! I thought the slowness would help it not burn, as would having to keep the lid on. Also, this allowed me to cook it for about three hours on low while I was working. I also used a lot of olive oil to grease the ceramic pot, in part to avoid burning and in part because I felt that a little fat could improve the flavor. (See what Julia Child has done to me?)

After cooking, I blended some of the cooked stuff (left) and left some more unblended.

Then I stirred them into hot water again:

Boom! Both were good, but I felt that the blended, cooked one was best. So I cooked the remaining bouillon paste. I strongly suspect that you don’t even need to blend the cooked stuff because it’s soft enough to just mush up with a spoon. Although of course, the blender works better.

Thus far, it has failed to freeze into a block and it’s been in the freezer for hours. I am very excited about this. Yes, it’s a ton of work to chop, process, cook and blend all that stuff, but now I’m not buying expensive bouillon or boxed stock for most of 2010. If I were to do this again, by the way, I would probably use the sun-dried tomatoes after all. Veggie bouillons tend to contain tomatoes, and I think it might take the grassy edge off the other stuff.

And when it was all done, I took all my sample broths, dumped them in a saucepan and made myself a quick minestrone soup using canned tomatoes and garbanzos, pasta and chopped veg. It was lovely and relatively easy. WIN.