Jaune Chat's Adventures In Cooking With a Soup Bone!

[jaune_chat]

So, the other week, Mr. Chat made a lamb roast. And though the lamb was stupidly expensive for being so out-of-season, we rubbed it with herbs and lemon juice, pushed garlic into it, and roasted it, and it was quite good. But then we were left with two meaty lamb bones just chock full of flavor

Comments

[game_byrd]

Haha! So glad you could rescue it! That sounds awful yummy! I love lamb.

There may be lots of ways to cook with soup bones, but here's what little I've learned:
- Use as little water as you can get away with and let it reduce down to half at least twice. That is, if you start with two quarts, let it simmer until you have one quart of broth, then add another quart of water and simmer until you have one quart of broth.
- Works best if you add an onion, some celery, and carrots with the bones. Leave in the whole time. the onion/celery/carrot combo is a chef standard called mirepoix.
- A bone adds a lovely additional flavor to anything cooked for a very long time, like in a crockpot overnight. Anything cooked for only an hour or two isn't long enough to extract much flavor from a bone.
- If at all possible, break the bone before cooking. Put it on concrete and hit it with a hammer a few times. A bone that is already in cross section, like a chop bone or a T-bone, is fine as is. Small, porous bones like those on chickens and turkeys are fine as is, too. But a long, solid bone like for a bone-in ham or whole rib bones need to be broken to let the flavor out.

[jaune_chat]

Ya, the website I was using was very scanty on the quantities and sizes and whatnot to use for soup-bone-broth making. Also on the breaking before using. I know about mirepoix, but I have a special distate for onions (and to a lesser extent, celery). Even cooked to softness, I abhor the texture. I don't mind onion flavor, but having onions themselves in the soup would preclude me from eating any of it. Hence the onion salt.

I did cook it for quite a few hours (I actually started it on Wednesday night at about 1am (I'm nocturnal due to my work schedule), cooked it until about 8am, and then stuck it in the fridge until about 4pm on Friday and then started with my rescue attempts. :D The meat turned out tender, though the potatoes could have used more time.