You Can Make an Incredible Turkey Veggie Soup

Out of the blue, my spouse indicated that more veggies in our meals would be a good thing. I realized my spouse was actually saying “I want some good, home cooking.. That spurred me on to make an incredible (my term) turkey bone stock, then a turkey soup with lots of hearty vegetables and herbs.

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Turkey Bone Broth Veggie Soup

Some Definitions First

Let me start with some reminders of what terms mean since we get them all mixed up, and I am using a technique that blurs the line a bit.

• Stock (aka Bone Broth) has nothing but meat bones (that may be roasted or raw) and water that cooks in excess of 8-48 hours depending upon the animal bones and what you are making. This is what “bone broth” is all about, not really flavorful, kind of bland, but has some flavor of the animal and is full of important nutrients that are easy to digest and make available to our bodies. It is also fatty, as the collagen and fat renders into the stock.
• Broth is filtered, cleared stock, with some added aromatics, and tends to be mildly flavored so it is very easy to tolerate and digest. It looks like, and can be drunk like tea, and is always considered lightly savory. This is what a hospital might serve someone on a liquid diet.
• Soup is a broth with vegetables and/or meat, where flavor is optimized and it contains more liquid than solids.
• Stew is a thick gravy-like soup with vegetables and/or meat, that is more solid than liquid.
• Stock2: This is my term for when I am making a bone stock with pre-cooked bones (like leftover bones from a previous meal). The reason is that the carcass contains portions of the previous’ meal spices, herbs, and seasoning. It comes with a particular flavor that is imparted into the water. However, I am cooking the bones as a “bone broth” so it is simmering for a long time to pull out the nutrition in the bones themselves. I do filter this stock before I use it for soup or stews.

The Picture Is Worth 1k Words

The picture above tells the complete story. See the rich color of the stock? That color comes from the low simmering of turkey bones, with some left over meat, from our 2022 holiday dinner that has been sitting in a bag in the freezer for months. See the little bubbles of fat on the soup? That is the richness from those bones seeping through, plus just a little bit of butter I added to sauté some of the veggies before adding them to the broth.

Then I see there is the pile of colorful veggies, sitting like an island in a sea of stock. The black flecks are long-peppers I ground up in the pestle and mortar, which added a nice lingering spice flavor. Oh can you not almost smell the turkey flavor, taste it on your tongue, feast on it with your eyes?

Here is where I wish there were “scratch and sniff” technology that worked on computers, so you could get a whiff of this food. The house smells marvelous.

Turkey Bone Stock

One of my strengths as a cook, based on my spouse’s opinion, is in the area of stocks, broths, soups, and stews. True or not, I am going to break down all the details of making this soup using the Stock2 technique.

Water + Bones

For making Stock there are two types of bones for this process, fresh ones from the butcher (which you can roast or not) or cooked ones from a previous meal. For this batch of stock I used bones from a 14# fresh organic roasted turkey that was cooked with an herbed butter (see my post: My Best Traditional Holiday Meal Ever).

• After the holiday dinner I split the bones into two gallon freezer bags and poured any scraped or dripped fats from the cooking pan into those bags. There were bits of meat here or there, still on the bones, gristle, skin, and the fatty tail.
• Then I labeled the bags with a title and date, and put them into the freezer.
• Later, during cleanup I added any leftovers to the bags so that nothing went to waste. By the way, I do not use gnawed-on bones, just bones that have been separated from the meat before serving.

To start my soup, I emptied one bag of bones into my largest pot with a lid. Then I poured regular cold tap water into the pan until it was ~2” from the top. I used ~8C – 12C of water by the end, because after about 3 hours cooking I took out 4C to make a quick soup for lunch, and had to add that water back into the pot so I would get a good large batch of stock.

• I started with regular cold tap water rather than hot water, so that water-soluble proteins (albuim) will have time to dissolve, before being locked up by the denaturing process. This helps create a more flavorful stock.

I put it on the stove to bring to a boil, and add 2T vinegar, and 2 bay leaves, then turned it down to a simmer.

Vinegar

The vinegar is not for flavor, but to help break down the bones for a richer stock. Acid helps in breaking down cartilage and other connective tissues in these bones, which in turn speeds up the formation of gelatin in the stock.

White vinegar I found works the best for it does not impart flavor, nor does it color the stock. A lot of people swear by Apple Cider Vinegar, but to me it can flavor stock which I do not like.

Bay Leaf

The Chefs I have worked under added bay leaves to stews, soups, braises, pasta sauce, and when boiling dried beans. For most of my life, I added bay leaves to dishes because either the recipe told me to, or it was a habit instilled by my mother, or Oma, or a Chef.

Reality is that I cannot define to you exactly what it adds to any dish, and experts use words and phrases like: it adds complexity, or its tea-like quality, adds a layer of subtle background music, they add a lil’ somethin-somethin, and everyone uses the word subtle. So from these description can you tell me its taste?

In 2016, Kelly Conaboy wrote “The Vast Bay Leaf Conspiracy. What does a bay leaf taste like? Nothing,” she wrote. “What does a bay leaf smell like? Nothing. What does a bay leaf look like? A leaf. How does a bay leaf behave? It behaves as a leaf would, if you took a leaf from the tree outside of your apartment building and put it into your soup.

So I pondered the question of what a bay leaf tastes like. I even made a bay leaf tea to figure out its taste, and I am honestly still stumped. I think once I finish this batch of recently bought bay leaves I may just not get them anymore. A Chef once described the bay leaf as providing a combination of subtle flavor, reminiscent of black tea, oregano, thyme, and a bit like menthol earthiness. If true I can just add those things if I wanted.

Cooking

The water, bones, vinegar, and bay leaf are all in the pot and ready to go. So I then bring it to a rolling boil, until foam starts to form on the top, and then turn it down to a low simmer. This is when I do the main scum cleaning. That is, I spoon off anything gungky that floats to the top of the water and dispose of it. Then I put on the lid and the time count starts then.

For six hours I just check to make sure everything looks okay. This has been enough time for the bay leaves to already start to impart their impression in the stock, and so does the meat and skin. The bones take longer for their goodness to leach out. But there was the previous cooking that included thyme, oregano, sage, and rosemary, and those herbs are already in the water and added great flavor.

This 6-hour mark is a good time to carefully pull 4C of stock, as free from any solids as I can, then filter it so the broth would be clear. This would be the base of my soup. Meanwhile, I added tap water back into the stock to replace what I took, brought up to a boil again, then down to a simmer. Lid on and the timing continued.

Storage + Meat Removal

At hour 12 I am ready and so is the broth. I could go longer, but I checked and the stock looked and tasted good. So I turned off the heat, took off the lid, and let it cool while I gathered my freezer storage containers, found all the lids, and found my ladle.

I strain all of the bigger chunks with a finely meshed steel strainer, and the remaining liquid becomes my stock.

• If the whole pan of stock was going to be used as strictly broth, say for someone who is sick, I would clean the strainer, mold cheesecloth on the inside, and pour the broth a second time to remove any fine particles. This would be a clear broth that can be a drink.

All the bones and other remains are put into a bowl for me to pick (more on this below).

By this time the sieved stock has cooled, I was ready to ladle the liquid into my freezer containers. Then lid them, add a sticker with the date and type of stock (Nov 23 Turkey) and put into the freezer.

• Turkey Bone Stock Recipe
  • Put left over bones + meat into a soup pot or slow cooker
  • Add as much cold tap water as the pan holds, 8-12C with allowing an 1-2” for expansion
  • Add 2T white or white wine vinegar
  • Add 2 dried bay leaves
  • Turn on high to start a boil, then turn down to a small simmer
  • Skim off any scum you may see
  • Keep on the stove cooking for 12-16 hours
  • Keep an eye out for water loss, but otherwise do not disturb the pot
  • Once done, filter out the bones and such, they should be composted or disposed
    • I always remove all the meat remaining on the bones to augment the dogs’ food
  • Cool and pour the stock into freezer containers for long term storage

A Gift to Dogs

I sit at the dinner table with a large towel spread as a work surface, then take the bowl of remaining stuff and separate the edible parts from the remaining softer bones. What remains are soft jelly like cartilage, and lots of meat I could not remove before.

From the relatively “clean” eaten bones I started with, I still pulled off nearly 3C of meat. The bones are disposed of while the meat is portioned into freezer containers to augment the dogs’ processed dry food. I add some of the broth to each container so some of the leached nutrients are added back. The reason bone broth is great for dogs is it is very tasty and nutritious. The broth has vitamins and minerals, protein, collagen, glycine, and glucosamine (1).

If I wanted to, I could dry the bones left over from the bone broth and grind them into a bone powder to use in baking dog treats. Which I actually did about 20 years ago, I made dog treats that called for bone powder which we bought, but also can be made.

While I was pulling the meat off the bones, I had two doggies sitting on either side of me, one had his head on my lap with eye balls near the top of his head to keep an eye on me, while the other had to sit since her head was streched so far back to watch me carefully for any spillage. Both trying very hard to use their telepathy to levitate food into their mouths. Amazingly it happened, once or twice.

Turkey Vegetable Soup

At the 6-hour mark I removed 4C of bone stock from the soup pot and used that to make a vegetable soup. Here are the directions for making that very tasty soup.

Mise en Place

I started by washing all the veggies: 2 medium sized russet potatoes, 1 small carrot, 1 spring onion from my garden, ~3” remains of a daikon, celery, and a sliver of remaining green cabbage. Then each is chopped into my preferred ways for this dish. I leave the skin on all the veggies except for removing spots on the potatoes, and I did peel the daikon.

Then I pulled out my second largest pot with lid, and melted 1-2T butter. Then sautéed the vegetables. First by adding the carrots and potatoes until softened. Then adding the daikon, celery, and spring onion. Finally adding the thinly sliced cabbage. Once the carrots had a soft exterior I added herbs and seasoning, 1t crumbled dried sage, 3 long-pepper crushed in the mortar and pestle, and 1/2t kosher salt.

Then I added the broth to the vegetables and brought up to a boil, then immediately down to a simmer. Lid was put on and I let it cook for ~8 minutes before tasting to see how it was going. I had my spouse take a taste to see if anything else was needed, received the “a-okay” hand gesture and lunch was ready.

• Vegetables for Turkey Soup
• In my smaller soup pan I warmed up 1T butter and then sautéed, in order
  • 2 medium potatoes with peel, chopped into 1-2” pieces
  • 1 small carrots with cleaned peel, chopped into coins
  • 1 spring onion from the garden
  • ~3” daikon piece that I skinned and cut every which way
  • 1/2C celery chopped into 1/2” pieces and I included the leaves
  • ~1/2C thinly chopped green cabbage
• I added 1t crushed dried sage, 1/2t kosher salt, and 3 crushed long-peppers to the vegetables
• Then I poured 4C of strained stock into the pot, enough to cover the veggies
• Bring to a boil, then cooked on low simmer for ~8min
• Taste and season, then serve

Salutations

Making a great soup is easy to do when it is made this way. All the flavor is already there, you just need to draw it out.

The frozen broth is kept in containers that match the sizes I need, so I have 1C and 4C containers as cooking for 2 people calls for smaller sizes. For example, when our son is home I use 8C of broth usually. So there is at least one of those containers usually in the freezer waiting to be used.

In terms of meat, this is the way I usually “eat meat,” I am not as fond of the texture of meat per se, but I love the taste of bone stock in broths, soups, and stews. But also I use stock in gravy and sauces. In fact, I often replace water with this type of stock for cooking rice, couscous, quinoa, barley, and other grains and seeds.

—Patty

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