This falls under the category of "Things I should have been doing for years but now that I've figured it out, I'll just have to do them henceforth."
I never used to clarify my broths before canning, because I thought it would take a lot of extra time. Turns out, it's super easy, and well worth the effort.
I made chicken broth this weekend, because that's what we do when it's 100° outside, right? Steam up the house? Logical for mid-August, surely. I was given a rooster, and the pantry has been bereft of chicken broth for months, so I loaded up a roaster and had at it.
Roo, roasted onions, celery, a carrot, couple tablespoons of salt and apple cider vinegar, all topped off with water and set at 220° for about 20 hours.
Broth nights are when I wake up at 3:00 AM from dreams of chicken noodle soup. It smells great.
Next morning, ready to stir.
The worse it looks, the better it is. Here, we're ready to start straining it.
After straining through a flour sack towel:
Thus far, no change to my usual routine. But then, I took three egg whites and blended them up with some water, and stirred it into the boiling broth. It looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off:
I turned off the burner and let it set five minutes, and we ran it back through a flour sack towel again, into a pot set in ice water, then moved it into a dispenser for getting it into jars:
It's beautiful! No cloudiness, and almost completely defatted as well!
Normally we move it into the dispenser in order to separate the fat from the broth, but that step was really unnecessary this time. I'll have to check again when I make beef broth, but if clarifying removes the fat this well, then that alone makes it a time saver. I've always had to cool it down to 120° or so, to avoid breaking my dispenser, and then of course heat it back up in the canner.
Before canning:
Most of it went into the pressure canner at 10 pounds for 25 minutes.
After canning:
Everything sealed. It looks fantastic. I tasted some that we reserved for cooking this week - a touch heavy on the celery, but a very nice broth. I was worried that clarifying would take away flavor, but my fears were unfounded.
Sometimes it just takes having another someone ask you, "Do you clarify your broth?" to finally get action. Other people have asked me this over the years, and I think it was just that this time I had time to look it up and do it.
Also, it was much easier experimenting with a "small" two-gallon batch than the usual 7-10 gallon extravaganza!
Never too late to learn a new trick!
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