We made broccoli soup. Simple: blanched broccoli, salt, broccoli water. The base screams broccoli. We also made some gigante beans. Cooking beans at 7300 feet is a bit of an inconvenience. We have now started cooking beans as a braise, covered in a 250-degree oven until they are tender. The beans cool in the liquid and the result is a perfectly cooked bean, which if cooked on the stove, would have taken many more hours, a lot more attention, and most likely would not have been cooked evenly. However, it is the turkey broth, which crowns the truffle-glazed beans and floats atop the soup, that is really important to me. Turkey broth is an underutilized ingredient. Sure, there is turkey gravy and turkey and rice soup, but the uses of a clean and rich turkey broth in dishes are few and far between. We make our broth in a pressure cooker, a quick extraction that we then reduce in order to concentrate flavors. We use the broth for cooking beans, to make risotto, glaze sweetbreads, and most recently as a light froth on top of a soup. It adds a decadence that is simple to generate and more often than not ends up in the trash as a roast turkey carcass. Oh, and if you are like us, you could smoke the carcass or the broth first for another interesting element in the broth and your pantry.
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