The ultimate broth for noodle soup
You may be mostly focused on the noodles, meat or vegetables, but a noodle soup stands or falls with the broth you use. So stay very far away from stock cubes; this is how you’re going to do things from now on.
Making your own broth may sound intimidating, complicated and time-consuming. Believe me: it isn’t. All you have to do is throw ingredients into a pan and wait/Netflix. I also dreaded it for years and simply threw a piece of ginger and some spring onion into the water together with my stock cube. Once you’ve made broth, you’ll see that it requires hardly any work and the result is so delicious. You’ll genuinely never want anything else.
Do what I do: make a huge pan and reduce it to one-third. Freeze it in an ice cube tray or a disposable piping bag. Thanks to the bones, the reduced broth is wonderfully gelatinous, and you can easily cut a piece off. That way, you always have homemade broth at home.
Cleaning
If you really want it to happen quickly: buy a pressure cooker. Your broth will then be ready in half an hour. A simple Chinese broth is often made from chicken carcasses and pork bones. Put both in a pan with cold water and bring to the boil. Drain, discard the water and rinse the pork bones especially well. If you’re making a pork-free broth, you can essentially skip this step.
Simmering
For the everyday stock by Chinese cuisine queen Fuchsia Dunlop, all you need to add is a piece of ginger and the white parts of a few spring onions. Put these in the pan together with the rinsed bones, and add enough water to cover everything. Bring it all to the boil and let it simmer gently for approx. 2 hours. Every now and then, skim the impurities from the surface with a slotted spoon.
Salting
Only at the very end should you season the broth with salt, soy sauce or fish sauce. Note that you really need quite a lot of salt. You may take your first sip and think your broth has failed because it tastes musty and bland. Simply add more salt until you’re blown away by the divine flavour.
Freezing the broth for later use? Then don’t add any salt at all, but only do so when you actually use it in a dish. This way, you can adjust the salt level to suit a dish that may already be very salty.
Prosciutto
Have you mastered this simple technique, or do you simply want to start with the very best broth? I swear by the recipe from Danny Bowien of Mission Chinese, a modern Chinese restaurant in New York. His broth contains 1 whole chicken; 500 g chicken wings; 500 g pork feet or bones; 1 leek; 15 cm ginger, sliced; 1 piece of kombu and the secret ingredient: 150 g prosciutto, per 6 litres of water.
The method is otherwise the same as described above. First bring the chicken and pork to the boil and rinse them, then return them to the pan with the rest of the ingredients and the water. Bring everything to the boil and let it simmer gently for approx. 2 hours, and you’re done. Danny doesn’t season the soup with salt, but with fish sauce for extra umami.
Vegetarian
Are you vegetarian? Don’t worry, you too can enjoy a delicious noodle soup that you’ve made entirely yourself. Bring water with shiitake mushrooms, carrot, spring onion or leek, and bean sprouts to the boil. A major advantage is that vegetarian broth only needs to simmer for approx. 30 minutes before you have a delicious broth. Enjoy your meal!
