As Americans increasingly embrace the wisdom of their ancestors’ food traditions, items with distinctly healthful benefits are enjoying a full-circle revival as legitimate culinary stars. Bone broth is one of those easy, healing foods that was commonplace in our great grandparents’ day, and now, the hot, nourishing liquid is once again at the forefront of the health-and-wellness movement.
Executive chef Harley Peet, keenly attuned to natural foodways and customary methods, has developed a delectable trio of broths for Bumble Bee Juice, Bluepoint Hospitality’s cold pressed juice shop in Easton, Maryland. His three traditional varieties – Beef, Chicken, and Vegetable – are available hot, to consume à la minute, or cool, in take-home containers suitable for reheating. Delicious on their own as a beverage, these broths are also a super-ingredient: any broth will enhance flavor in a dish, but bone broths, especially, instantly improve the mouthfeel of a sauce thanks to the natural dissolved collagen and gelatin they contain. An added boon of bone broth is its ability to thicken and gel a sauce much as flour would, a winning solution for those with gluten allergies.
Bone broth is prized for its many therapeutic properties, including improving joint mobility and muscle recovery, healing digestive issues, and reducing inflammation. To amplify these benefits, Chef Peet sources pure ingredients. His beef bone broth owes its goodness to the bones of pasture-raised animals from mid-Atlantic farms that practice ethical animal husbandry and environmental stewardship. Joint bones are especially beneficial for broth, being rich in cartilage and connective tissue that render out in the super-long cooking process. Peet values knuckle bones for minerals and collagen, neck bones for their meatiness, and veal feet for their collagen-dense tendons.
The chicken broth originates with premium birds from Allen’s, an all-natural chicken farm whose proprietor is a personal friend of the chef. For the broth, Peet uses legs and thighs, quartering them to increase their surface area in the cooking process. He oven-roasts the bones on both sides, covering them to promote the accumulation of juices, which are then strained and defatted, and reduced down to intensify the flavor as a broth base. Simmered low-and-slow over an extended period, the flavor and body are drawn fully into the hearty broth.
While bone broth gets the most fanfare, don’t under-estimate the ability of earthy mushrooms to make a flavor-filled broth; health food aficionados have long put their faith in the humble fungus for its immunity-boosting properties. The body of the vegetable broth is enhanced by reducing the cooking liquid and enriching the stock with natural starches.
Bumble Bee Broths are hearty, smooth-drinking restorative brews. Healthy and tasty add-ins customize each cup, from turmeric and chives to marinated mushrooms and grated parmesan for a rich umami boost. They are sugar-free, salt-free, gluten-free, and very low in calories.
Broths have played a part in many culinary traditions for centuries: from Italian brodo to American chicken noodle soup and Vietnamese pho, a robust broth is at the base of some of the worlds’ most comforting foods. Bumble Bee Broths has captured the true taste of this culinary elixir as it enjoys its modern-day resurgence.