Same is true for lamb. I like making soup and other dishes with lamb elements left over from roasts, but you do have to be careful with managing the higher apparent “greasiness to flavor ratio” in the resulting stock than you generally get with beef or chicken.
We do that by repeatedly hearing then cooling then defatting. By doing it in the winter we can take the pots out to the porch for quick chilling.
That’s what I gathered from googling as well. It can be kind of gamey if you use a lot of pork, and without it, it’s just bland.
Either way, it’s fairly fatty.
So it’s great for something like tonkatsu ramen broth, but not really something you’re likely to base a soup around.
Ham stock, on the other hand, makes a wonderful soup with potatoes, leftover Christmas ham, carrots, celery, etc… (yes, I know it’s also pork-based, but it’s cured and smoked pork)
Maybe - just thinking of what gets cooked in my house , there aren’t any pork dishes that would require stock/broth. If we’re going to have some sort of stew, it’s going to be beef and soup will be beef , turkey or chicken. There are a few chicken dishes we eat with sauces that call for chicken stock . If we’re eating pork it’s either ham (and we don’t make gravy ) pork chops, bacon, BBQ ribs, Chinese roast pork or pork belly. If we ever did roast a pork shoulder or loin, my husband would make a gravy from the drippings.
There was a stigmatization of pork. Not ham, not bacon, but pork was called “The other white meat” after a major marketing redemption campaign. Before that it was called “The greasy, fatty meat”. People knew what pigs ate and were fattened up on too. I don’t know if it’s connected to the pork stigma but lard was once the common type of grease and shortening used in cooking, not butter and fancy oils. Lard was pushed aside by the influential dairy industry in favor of highly subsidized butter.
In a nutshell. There are only a few chicken stock/broth varieties that are rated as having any flavor other than salt, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a good rating for a beef stock/broth. Wirecutter is a good source for the chicken variety (may be paywalled).
I remember olden days my mother made a delicious pork roast with a nice layer of fat, salt and pepper, and studded with onion rings that would burn to a crisp with the fat. We fought over those onions! And made a little dark gravy from the drippings. Today, pork is a lean pink blob. Not much flavor, if you ask me, and releasing pink juice, not fat. I would think it would have a bit of an ‘oink’ to it, that juice.
You and Beck got it covered.
Something my wife does a lot with, say, a pot of beans is to cook down a few strips of bacon in the bottom of the pot. Let bacon fat render, remove cooked strips (chop up and throw back in later, if desired), and then fill up the pot with water. Pour water right onto that bacon grease, let it mix around as it will. Proceed from there to cook beans as normal. Salt pork (known locally as “pickle meat” [no “d” in “pickle”]) gets added to the beans later on. Chopped smoke sausage (more pork) as well.
I’ve made plenty of pork broth at home, but I’ve never seen it for sale commercially. Hell, it’s only recently that I’ve seen vegetable broth on sale commercially. (Would have come in handy that nine months I was a vegetarian in 2002.) Most of my life, the only broth I’ve seen for sale was chicken or beef, either liquid, or in bullion cube form.
It’s pretty easy to make, and we’ll always use the good stuff if we have it in the freezer, but we still often need to use the boxed stuff from the store. I haven’t noticed a big difference in flavor, it’s mostly just the color. If you want a lighter soup, use chicken broth, if you want it darker, use beef. If you want flavor, add some, because the grocery store broth is only a little better than salted water.
User name/post check out.
FWIW, I’ve been using vegetable boullion since at least the 1980s, so it may be a regional distribution thing. Maybe Knorr? I’d think areas with larger populations that keep kosher or use health food stores would have had vegetable boullion.
Any smoked, cured, pickled or treated pork is a different beast.
A fresh ham is much different than cured ham. It just an altogether different flavor.
They can and are used in some of the same ways. It’s a versatile meat in lots of ways. Believe me, you can screw it up.
Think of the difference in flavor of pork loin and your holiday ham.
I just think pork broth can easily be made. That’s why it’s not so commercially available and not something home cooks are in a great need of.
Penzey’s has pork soup base. They have some brick-and-mortar stores, but most of their business is online.
They also have (in addition to the ubiquitous beef, chicken and vegetable) ham, seafood, and turkey soup bases. You can get turkey broth at grocery stores here, but only at Thanksgiving time. The others are rarely if ever seen.
I’m hijacking this thread to announce that I am now inspired by the OP to make and freeze my own pork stock.
Eh, I see seafood stock or crab stock for sale in the better furnished mega marts, but it’s at a premium. Far cheaper to save all my shrimp shells (I buy shell on, deveined, IQF shrimp most frequently) to make it as you need it.
Maruchan is very widely distributed and the pork flavor is easy to find. Even among the familiar plain blandness of Maruchan standard instant noodles, pork is one of the weaker flavors.
Actually, at the costs of Maruchan, buying a case and using the (extra scare quotes) ““flavor packet”” is almost certainly the cheapest option for getting a pork broth condensate, rather than any of the other listed concentrates. And probably has the same amount of salt, flavor and msg you’d expect, with no stronger (or weaker) flavor.
I’ve seen it, but then I work in a grocery store. It’s not as commonly purchased as chicken or beef broth, so I’m assuming a lot of places don’t bother to stock it.
What’s the Difference Between Ham and Pork? -.
“all ham is pork”
I’ll also point out that, on top of that, there are millions of people living in the US who avoid pork due to religious dietary rules (Jews and Muslims). Even folks not otherwise religious but of those backgrounds might avoid eating pork. It’s not the entire reason, but it adds to the reasons “pork broth” is not a staple in the US.
I dunno. I eat pork, but I’ve never cooked with pork broth. I have thrown a ham hock into pea soup, which is pretty similar to cooking with ham broth, though. Maybe the answer is that most of the traditions that use pork broth make it in situ.