I am reaching new heights of food-snobbery

[cjsmith]

ambar, you are so right. Using canned beef broth is like drinking white Zin.

Comments

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

*grin* I'm not pitching out this onion soup, either. But there are more full-bodied alternatives. (Sadly, they involve buying a chunk of beef, making the whole enterprise quite a bit pricier.)

[mama-hogswatch.livejournal.com]

Have you ever tried commercial soup base? Canned broth is not as strongly flavorful as this stuff. It's a meat paste sold in a tub, and you can use it in a high enough concentration to get a far better flavor than the canned broth.

_the_beast uses it and he's a professional chef.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

"Concentration" is definitely one thing the canned broth seemed to be lacking. Thanks for the idea!

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

what's the brand name?

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

Get yourself a jar of demi glace. It's pricey, but a little goes a *long* way, and it saves having to use homemade stock.

I use maybe a tablespoon in my onion soup (my recipe makes about four quarts). Makes all the difference in the world. For beef based dishes, you can use either veal or beef demi glace.

I like it better than soup bases, which tend to be salty. Demi glace is richer.

Williams-Sonoma sells it online (http://www.williams-sonoma.com/shop/fod/fodsau/fodsaudem/index.cfm?cm_type=lnav).

ETA: I use Wolfgang Puck's packaged beef stock for my onion soup.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I have zero clue here. What do you do with demi glace? Add it to canned broth? Add it to water?

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

Add it to the hot broth/stock/soup, then whisk it in. Or, to make things a little easier, take some (about a cup) of the hot broth/stock/soup from the pot and whisk the demi glace into that until dissolved, then add it all back to the pot.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh cool. So if I made onion soup with onions and canned beef broth, I'd add this stuff to make the flavors richer and more complex? It sounds like exactly what I didn't know I needed!

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

Exactly!