Making Beef Broth

I make foundational beef or chicken broths about 3-4 times a year.  When I do, they last us for many months of cooking and recipes.

Fall and winter is the big broth making season for us because our soup and stew making increases by leaps and bounds in the dark, cold, hibernating seasons. To make the broth for these, all we need is a day when we will be hanging around the house - puttering, reading, doing the laundry, blogging or staying close.

Preparation is easy and results in a deeply rich flavored beef broth. The organic ingredients (since we are extracting the essence of all these, we don't want pesticide or hormone-laden stuff) don't need to be prepared in a fussy way. Carrots go in washed with ends nipped off. Celery, we cut in half to make sure it gets immersed. Onions go in peeled and whole. The long slow cooking time will reduce these veggies down.

The most active part of the recipe is roasting the beef bones before I begin. I learned this trick from the cookbook "Caprial's Bistro Style of Cuisine." Set the oven at 450F. Put the bones on a lipped tray with an unpeeled garlic or two and roast in the oven for an hour.  Put the bones in the soup pot, squish the garlic into the pot and then the fun part. Deglaze the roasting pan with a little red wine and scrape up all the little tasty, roasted bits and add to the soup pot.

Add water to cover and simmer 6-8 hours. Strain the broth through a cheese cloth (toss out the cooked out veggies - they've done their job flavoring and enriching the broth). Refrigerate (or put outside) until cool. Skim off the fat, put into 1 or 2 cup containers and freeze. Pop the big cubes out the next day into a freezer bag and voila - heart and soul warming broth that YOU made, ready for every recipe!