Pantry Staples

Chicken Broth

Chicken broth is one of the most universally stocked liquids in a Western pantry, reached for almost by default whenever a savory dish needs more depth than plain water alone would give it.

A traditional homemade batch starts with a whole chicken or bony parts — backs, necks, wings — simmered gently with aromatic vegetables for a few hours, a genuinely different starting point from an industrially produced carton.

Beyond soup, it's a standard cooking liquid for grains like rice or quinoa, a braising liquid for vegetables, and a quick base for a pan sauce built right after searing meat.

It's sold in several genuinely different forms — canned, aseptic cartons, and concentrated bouillon cubes, paste, or powder meant to be reconstituted with water — each with a different sodium concentration and a different convenience tradeoff for a home cook.

A well-made pot of chicken soup built on a rich chicken broth is often nicknamed "Jewish penicillin," a folk-remedy reputation for treating a cold that's tied to generations of home cooking and comfort as much as to any proven medicinal effect.

Matzo ball soup relies specifically on a well-seasoned chicken broth as its base, with the dumplings simmered directly in the broth itself rather than boiled separately and added afterward.

Bouillon cubes emerged as a shelf-stable, portable broth concentrate in the late 19th and 20th centuries, a genuine convenience-food innovation that let home cooks approximate a slow-simmered broth's flavor in minutes rather than hours.

Concentrated chicken broth sold as a paste in a small jar has grown popular with home cooks in recent years, sitting as a middle ground between a bouillon cube's convenience and a full carton's fuller, less salty flavor.

A whole chicken simmered gently to make broth is traditionally strained afterward, with the cooked meat itself often reserved and shredded for a second dish like chicken salad or a pot pie, so nothing from the pot goes to waste.

A leftover rotisserie chicken carcass, picked mostly clean of meat, still makes a genuinely worthwhile pot of broth simmered with water and aromatics, turning what would otherwise be kitchen scraps into another usable batch.

Chicken broth-based congee, a savory rice porridge simmered slowly until the grains break down, is a defining comfort food across much of East and Southeast Asia, using broth as the primary cooking liquid rather than plain water.

A simple cup simmered with just a few slices of ginger and scallion is a home remedy some cooks reach for when feeling under the weather, echoing the same folk reputation the broth carries in Jewish cooking under a different set of aromatics.

A splash added to a skillet of sautéed vegetables just before they finish cooking helps them steam through gently without needing extra oil or butter to keep them from sticking.