Fond & Buillion & Sauces
Stocks made from vegetables and/or bones
Stock is the French term for foundation. A stock is created whenever vegetables, meat, or fish are cooked. Because a stock becomes very flavorful after sufficient cooking time, it can be used to make a sauce that perfectly complements the dish. The most well-known types of stock are vegetable stock, roast stock, veal stock, and fish stock. If you want to make a vegetable stock yourself, you will need a large cooking pot, a fine sieve, and a slotted spoon. The main ingredients are about 2.5 liters of water, two bunches of soup greens, 2-3 onions, 2 garlic cloves, a bay leaf, salt, and some crushed peppercorns. After washing the vegetables and peeling the onions and garlic, cut everything (except for the bay leaf) into small pieces and sweat it with some fat. Then add the water and let everything simmer for about an hour over medium heat. If a lot of foam forms, you can skim it off in between. After the cooking time, strain the stock through the fine sieve and let it cool down.
If you prefer a hearty stock, making a strong meat stock is a good choice. For making a meat stock, you need not only soup greens, onions, and spices but also veal or beef bones. It is best to have the bones cut/chopped into small pieces by a butcher. While the bone pieces are roasted at about 200 degrees Celsius on some oil in the oven (approximately 30 minutes), you can clean and chop the vegetables. Put the roasted bones and the crust dissolved in a little red wine into a sufficiently large pot and add enough water to cover everything completely. Heat the contents slowly and skim off any foam if necessary. Now the sweated vegetables and spices can be added. The cooking time (medium heat) is about two hours. Finally, strain the stock again through a sieve. In the case of fish stock, fish bones and possibly tails and heads are the flavoring ingredients.
Much easier is the use of ready-to-use stocks that are bottled in jars. Product examples are Jürgen Langbein Lamb Stock, Le Garcon Game Stock, and Le Garcon Game Stock. Apart from the fact that such a stock requires no preparation on your part, you can of course always refine a ready-made stock as desired. A delicious soup can be quickly prepared from beef broth or beef bouillon. You will find Struik Berlin Beef Bouillon and Sonnen Bassermann My Beef Broth in our assortment; both products contain not only a very hearty broth but also pieces of meat (12 or 16 percent of each 350 milliliters).
Enjoy baked beans in many ways
If you have ever enjoyed an English-style breakfast, you are probably familiar with baked beans. The traditional preparation of baked beans requires dried white bean kernels that need to be soaked in water overnight. The soaked beans are then cooked in fresh water. An important ingredient is the sweet tomato sauce, which usually consists of tomatoes, onions, mustard, bay leaves, cloves, and molasses (or sugar beet syrup). Finally, the white beans are mixed with the tomato sauce and placed in a fireproof dish, covered with bacon slices, and cooked for about three hours at 120 degrees Celsius. Once in the Wild West, the embers of the campfire were used: The iron pot filled with the ingredients was simply placed in the fire overnight.
So preparing baked beans is mainly a matter of time. If you don't have it but still want to eat baked beans spontaneously, you should use canned goods. Here we offer you Heinz Baked Beanz in tomato sauce and Heinz Chili Beans in sweet chili sauce. You can serve Heinz Baked Beanz as part of a typical English breakfast, among other things. And Heinz Chili Beans in sweet chili sauce, for example, go very well with tacos. In contrast to the sweet and spicy tomato sauce of Heinz Baked Beanz in tomato sauce, the sweet chili sauce is characterized by a combination of sweet and spicy flavors. Sweet chili sauce is primarily used in Thailand and Malaysia. The most important ingredients for such a sauce are chili peppers, vinegar, water, sugar, garlic, salt, and sugar as well as cornstarch for thickening. By the way, baked beans can not only be used to have an English-style breakfast. Rather, baked beans can be used as an ingredient for many dishes. How about enjoying baked beans with french fries and fried eggs or adding grilled meat to the baked beans?
Egg custard - more than just a soup filling
A few decades ago, egg custard was an almost obligatory filling for clear soups. It is still an important ingredient for wedding soups. Wedding soups have a long tradition in many regions of Germany. The foundation of a wedding soup is either beef or chicken broth. Onions, vegetables, spices, and parsley add extra flavor. Besides egg custard, marrow balls are also excellent as a soup filling. It is still common in many places to offer a wedding soup as the starter of the respective wedding menu. The custom is that the bridal couple spoon the wedding soup together from a soup plate. This communal spooning symbolizes the future life as a married couple. In fact, egg custard is no longer as popular as it used to be. However, egg custard offers a great variety in the category of soup fillings if you have only used croutons or pancake strips so far. The name egg custard is probably due to the fact that the egg coagulates. To make egg custard, you need eggs, milk, butter, grated nutmeg, and salt. The mixture of eggs, milk, and spices is poured into a small, well-buttered casserole dish, which is then placed in a pot filled with water. The water bath should be as hot as possible, but the water must not boil during the 20-25 minutes of coagulation. Once again, it is much easier if you opt for a ready-made product: In our online shop, you can order Valenzi Egg Custard if you want to save yourself the trouble of making egg custard yourself. This product consists of whole egg, skimmed milk, and spices.
