Portable Soup: My Homemade Bouillon

Portable soup, a sort of homemade bouillon, sustained travelers before Cup O’ Noodles lined rest stop shelves and salty powdered bouillon cubes gave home cooks a short cut in making soups, stews and sauces.  Modern cooks who seem to favor time saving packaged ingredients over more elaborate traditions have lost their taste for laborious culinary undertakings and with that loss, we’ve likewise lost a slew of traditional foods – portable soup rests among them.

Me? I love the rich complexity of a true homemade stock.  I find its rich array of minerals and amino acids deeply fortifying and, as I’ve mentioned before, I typically try to serve up a quart of broth a day to each member of our family (the little guy gets a pint).  But we travel a good deal both for work and to support our son’s homegrown, wildly unschooled and self-propelled education.

Translation?  It’s tough to eat real, homemade foods on the road.

So, taking a cue from travelers before me, I began to make our own portable soup – a homemade bouillon that’s compact, stores well and for a long time, and that dissolves instantly in hot water for  a beautiful mug of rich, homemade broth.

history of homemade bouillon and portable soup

Portable soup was the first bouillon.  And, like all foods, it was homemade.  Cooks would stew bones in water for hours and hours, reducing the gelatin-rich stock down to a thick, viscous liquid that solidified when cooled.  Later, the thick, gelled broth would be cut and dried on flannel during the cool months where it could be stored indefinitely.

When circumstances took the family on the road, they’d grab the nuggets of portable soup – dissolving them in hot water, sprinkling in salt and cutting in whatever herbs and vegetables they could forage from the roadside.  In an instant, the traveler’s would have a meal – but unlike the instant meals of today, this was real food.

benefits of homemade bouillon

Every once in a while, Nourished Kitchen fans will ask for a substitute for bouillon cubes.  Those powdery, salty cubes contain a slew of nasty ingredients: processed fat, MSG, refined salt.  Even Better than Bouillon, sold in health food stores, is loaded with refined, industrial ingredients like maltodextrin; further, it lacks one of the most nutritionally valuable aspects of a true broth: gelatin.

Gelatin in broths, and also in homemade bouillon, soothes the digestive tract which is why gelatin-rich broths play such an enormous role in healing protocols like the GAPS diet.  Gelatin also supports skin health.

Homemade bouillon, made from long-simmered bones, is rich in all the same nutrients found in a good stock: minerals, amino acids and gelatin.  Only it’s compact – easy to bring on the road.

where to find good bones and gelatin

A good bouillon depends on good bones.  Most traditional recipes for portable soup – the original homemade bouillon – call for veal knuckle bones which typically produce a beautiful, strong gel, veal bones aren’t always available.  You can make homemade bouillon with any good quality bones: chicken, beef, veal, pork.  Bones can usually be purchased for as little as $1/lb from your local ranchers, so ask around at your farmers market.

Using a good quality, purchased gelatin helps to achieve the strong gel that is so essential in producing homemade bouillon. A purchased gelatin also acts as a bit of insurance policy – helping you to achieve that solid gel even if your stock was soft or you were unable to find bones that produce a firm gel like veal knuckle bones or chicken feet.  I use grass-fed bovine gelatin in my homemade bouillon and you can purchase it online (see sources).