Soup Peddler UTTERLY DESTROYS Fake Bone Broth Products

I figured, since everyone else is doing it, I’d take a page from the clickbait headline style guide.

Here’s a bit of TMI about your chicken soup. Our chicken bone broth is in a way is the crux of our whole operation. It stands for doing things the hard way, for honoring tradition, for providing a different level of quality. Like most terms in the food business, “bone broth,” which was meant to differentiate from lame packaged broths, is now being co-opted by those food packagers.

A little science. Check this NY Times article on MSG... one of the funny (sad) things buried in the article is that that the hippie-friendly-sounding "autolyzed yeast extract" found in nearly everything that comes in a box or package in your favorite high-end eco-supermarket, notably in the earthy-looking tetrapaks of chicken broth, is just another glutamate, not substantively different from MSG but has that natural-sounding "yeast" in it. And it's there to trick your tastebuds into LOVING that broth even though there's next to nothing in it. According to Cook's Illustrated, these yeast extracts "boost the flavor of beef [or chicken] by as much as 20-fold." That means that they only have to put one twentieth of the actual stuff in there, or you get one twentieth the amount of nutrient in your body. I've done calculations on our homemade stock vs. what tastes really darn good out of the tetrapak and found that our stock is between 20 and 100 times as strong as what you can buy on the shelf, on the best soup shelf in the best grocery store, but it doesn't have any yeast extract, so it doesn't fool your mouth and brain into thinking your body is actually going to receive nutrients that aren't really there. And that's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

What’s the big deal about bone broth?

It’s time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive to make, so that makes it rare. Bone broth like ours is cooked between 18 and 24 hours.

Is it really that good for you?

There are many health benefits. It gives you a thicker, shinier coat. It contains glucosamine and collagen which help your gut, joints, and skin function properly. Some studies show that it helps with sleep, immune support, and bone health. The internet is rife with helpful bullet-pointed websites describing this information in further detail.

Soup Peddler makes ours from scratch

Try our Chicken Soup with Rice and our excellent Chicken Tortilla Soup. Quarts of our bone broth are available at all our stores!