[Sca-cooks] TRYING TO FIGURE OUT A BROTH

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Heleen Greenwald:
>Question:
>How do you boil, let's say, 4 qts of water & broth fixings for 8 hrs without
>loosing all the liquid, and you would have to keep adding water but then
>wouldn't that totally dilute the finished broth?

You don't BOIL boil it; you bring it to a boil, then reduce it to the
barest quivering simmer. You may need to  top off the water a bit,
but that's largely because the process is less efficient using
smaller quantities. For a ten-quart batch, say, you don't have to add
any water; you just lose a small amount and  live with what's left.

>What do you mean by enriching the broth with shrimp shells? How do you do
>that?  (Maybe that was the seafood sweetness I tasted??)

Maybe. Some people (mostly Europeans, I would guess) swear by giving
the shrimp shells (say, the shells from the pound of shrimp you've
peeled for some other purpose) a toasting in a saucepan or skillet
until pink and dryish, then adding them to your stock ingredients.
Others just throw them in raw, or even just make a shrimp stock with
them, and mix it into the other meat stock.

You might just try the beef pho stock from the Charmaine Solomon book
quoted elsewhere; it's also one of my favorite Asian cookbooks. You
may find that the sweetness is vegetable in nature, or even just from
the beef.

Adamantius