Broth: The New Liquid Lunch

Broth: The New Liquid Lunch

Chefs are finally sharing their recipe for surviving winter: healthy, high-protein broths. Here are three to make at home, from Marco Canora, David Vandenabeele and Tony Maws

By Elizabeth Gunnison Dunn in the Wall Street Journal

Ah January, that time of year when we retreat, gouty and dyspeptic, into a state of self-imposed exile from the world of edible indulgences. December’s culinary exertions send us tumbling headlong into the produce aisle, searching for redemption in the form of salads and cold-pressed juices. Good for the waistline, sure, but also supremely off-kilter with the season. How could anyone find satisfaction in all those raw plants when the weather so clearly demands steaming stews and slow-cooked meats?

Consider turning instead to broth, quite possibly the only dish that counts as both a comfort food and a health aid. It’s savory, warming and high in protein and minerals, without any of the sugar that got you into trouble to begin with.

Broths are seemingly everywhere these days, the latest darlings of the wellness world, touted as beneficial for weight loss, skin quality, joint health and digestion. This is nothing new to chefs. In restaurant kitchens there is always a stock of some sort bubbling away for use in sauces, soups and braises, and chefs can often be seen sipping the stuff from plastic containers while they work.

The Recipes

Marco Canora, chef and owner of Hearth in New York and author of the new cookbook “A Good Food Day,” personally credits broth with sending him on a path to good health, helping to reverse years of dietary and lifestyle abuse. In November he opened Brodo, a takeout window attached to his East Village restaurant, where three types of meat broth are served coffee-bar style, in takeaway cups, with optional add-ins like ginger juice and Calabrian chili oil. “I drink broth all day, I love it. It fills me up, and I feel nourished by it,” said Mr. Canora.

“It’s delicious, it’s simple, it’s clean, it’s healthful. I always call chicken stock liquid gold,” said Jenn Louis, chef and owner of Lincoln Restaurant and Sunshine Tavern in Portland, Ore. This winter, she’s offering a simple bone broth starter at Lincoln. The formula changes every couple of weeks: Ms. Louis has served chicken, rabbit and pork broths, infused with sage and Parmesan, or cardamom, cinnamon and star anise. “It’s like a more nutritious form of drinking tea,” she said.

David Vandenabeele, the chef at New York’s Langham Place, Fifth Avenue, also seized on the parallels to tea drinking. As hotel chef of the Langham in London, Mr. Vandenabeele oversaw the popular afternoon tea service. Now, in Manhattan, he has reinvented the ritual by swapping in Three Broth Chicken Tea, a strong brew simmered with ginger, garlic, ginseng and Indonesian sweet soy sauce. It’s presented in a glass tea pot along with a ginger-sesame scone.

Bolyard’s Meat & Provisions, a butcher shop outside St. Louis, sells long-simmered chicken, beef and pork broths. Owner Chris Bolyard has been a broth enthusiast since 2009, when the stuff nursed him back to health after an Ironman triathlon. Meanwhile, California’s Belcampo Meat Co. cooks free-range pork, beef, chicken and lamb bones for 48 hours along with pork skin and apple cider vinegar and serves cups of the resulting bone broth at its locations in downtown L.A., Palo Alto and Santa Barbara. This winter, their San Francisco shop will feature a “broth pop-up,” with cups available to go at the butcher counter.

If broth makes a no-nonsense on-the-go snack, it can also be dressed up as a crystalline consommé, in which fat and sediment are filtered out, traditionally via an egg-white “raft” that pulls impurities to the surface. At Bazaar Meat in Las Vegas, chef David Thomas serves, in antique tea cups, a beef version modeled on one at Lhardy’s, Madrid’s iconic 19th-century brasserie. Chef Tony Maws stockpiles bones and turns them into a range of consommés at his Cambridge, Mass., restaurant Craigie on Main, including one made from game birds and spiked with Sherry.

“I’m a Jewish kid. Broth is what we do,” said Mr. Maws. “On a miserable winter day, there’s no place I’d rather be than with a bowl of soup in front of me.”

Poster's comments:
1)  The expectation of having a warm broth at the end of a security patrol is really good for the morale of those during their security patrol time. I learned that the hard way, by actually doing it.
2) Warm ramen broth is not to bad a way to start, and one can get the ingredients in most American grocery stores. And it is still relatively thrifty to buy.
3) Even anything warm will help those on patrol. Consider the importance of coffee, tea, apple cider, hot chocolate, etc.
4) Most people can at least boil water, or even heat up a warm broth. Even doing so on a wood stove or open fire is fine. 
5) One can make a soup kitchen type meal the same way as in the preceding number 4, too.  
6) If one can get expendable soap, do coat the outside of the pot containing the broth so as to make it easier to clean later. It tends to get fire based soot on it. Most scouts already know this, too.