- Hey, welcome back to The Average Kitchen.
Today, I'm gonna show you how to make a ham bone soup
from a ham bone that I cooked a while ago
and I actually froze.
I never throw that type of stuff out
'cause it makes an amazing base for a soup.
So you can see this massive guy here right here.
So I had vacuum sealed him.
So I'm just gonna throw him in this cast iron pot I have
and that's gonna be the basis or the starting point
of this amazing soup that we're gonna make today.
So you could see there,
so that was a massive bone-in ham shank
that I smoked on my Traeger smoker.
So normally I'd probably like to do this in a slow cooker
and just let it simmer all day
but because of the monstrosity of this bone,
it wouldn't fit.
So I think what I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna build my soup in this massive cast iron pot
and once I'm done with the bone and get rid of it,
I may end up dumping it into a slow cooker,
I may just simmer it on the stove, I'm not too sure yet
but basically what we're gonna do
is start adding just a can of corn.
I'm gonna throw in a full, just over a cup
of these little, tiny, small seashell pastas.
I'm gonna put those in as well.
I'm gonna put in probably eight to 10 cups of chicken broth.
There's four cups to start.
So I'm gonna get that poured in as well
and then I'll make another bunch as well
and then I'm going to throw in some beautiful thyme
that we grew this summer, this past summer in the garden
and then my wife actually hung and let it dry.
So I'm just gonna throw those sprigs in there like that.
It's gonna be spectacular.
Well, made a bit of a mess on my cutting board.
I don't wanna waste that.
We'll get that right into the soup.
Probably throw in about two tablespoons of dried parsley.
If you have fresh, even better.
Gonna chop up some carrots, some potatoes and some onion
and of course salt and pepper
and I also have some of the smoked ham
from that ham bone here
that a little bit later in the cook of the soup,
I'm gonna cut up and put it in the soup
and the reason I'm gonna wait
is 'cause if I put it in right now
and it's simmering all day,
I don't want that ham to get tough.
I want it to stay nice and tender the way it is
so I think I'll wait right till the end
and then add that ham.
So we'll put in pretty generous amounts of salt and pepper
and then we're gonna start working on her veg here as well.
So we've got no knife
which usually helps when you wanna cut veg
So just gonna chunk up some onion
and we'll get that into the pot.
Everything goes in
and then we're gonna peel a couple carrots.
So the carrots you can cut however you like,
doesn't really matter but if you don't,
what you don't want is for them to not be sort of uniformed
in their size.
So I want them to somewhat be consistent
and I don't want a massive chunk here
and then a little chunk here and there.
So I think what I'll do is split that down.
That's not too bad
and then I'll just start chunking like that.
There.
So we'll throw those carrots in
and we'll do up our other one.
So you'll definitely see in this case
with myself with this massive ham bone
is I'm giving up a lot of real estate in my plot to the bone
but it makes such a difference
when you're stewing down a bone to release all that flavor
as well as that gelatinous materials
that is within the bone and the fibers around it
which really kind of almost helps not thicken up your soup
but give it a little bit of viscosity to it.
So the other carrot.
So you can add more or less carrot if you want
but I think that's a pretty, a pretty good amount.
So we've got some potatoes here.
You could just wash them with a brush
but I think in this case here
I'm just gonna give them a quick rough peel
and then what I'll end up doing is I'm chopping them up
and give them a quick rinse
just to get some of the starch off.
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Just gave the potatoes a quick rinse.
You'll obviously see that I don't have a ton of potato here
but because I added that little bit of pasta,
I don't think we need a ton of potato
but I roughly wanna try to cut these into half
or sorry, half inch cubes roughly
then I'll do that for all of these small potatoes
that I have.
Potatoes are all sliced up.
Again, pretty consistent across the board in size
and besides presentation which obviously is one thing
that you want them to look the same,
you also want them to all cook the same.
So if you had a big chunk of potato
versus a little tiny chunk of potato
then they would cook at different rates
and it's possible if your chunk of tomato was,
potato, sorry, was too big,
it may not cook at all depending on what size it is
and how long you decide to cook your soup for.
So we'll just continue to add our potatoes here
and then we're gonna add in another four cups of broth
and see where we're at
and we may need to add a little bit more.
I'm also gonna throw in two bay leaves.
So we'll drop those in as well.
So I got my four cups of chicken broth that I made
or chicken stock.
So we're just gonna dump that in over top
then we'll see how we're doing this for as a level here
if we need more and I probably will do another two cups.
I'll do two more cups of this chicken broth
and I think that'll get us at a perfect level.
All right, so the last two cups.
We'll dump that in there.
That's perfect.
May just use my spoon here and just give this a quick stir
and then we're gonna get that onto the stove
and we're going to just get it simmering real nice and easy.
Nothing too crazy but already, I don't know about you,
maybe I'm a little bit biased, I think it looks amazing
and we haven't even really started cooking it yet.
So you'll see with this,
all of the little stems will eventually come off
and then you'll just be left with the stick
and we'll pull that out
'cause obviously nobody's gonna eat that.
So I just fired up the stove.
So I'm gonna bring that to a light simmer
and we're probably gonna simmer that
for three or four hours.
- [Narrator] Three hours later.
- The soup is looking amazing.
You could see it's just sort of just bubbling
and that's kind of what I wanted.
Just a light, light, light simmer.
In a little bit, I'm gonna pull that bone out.
I've got some beautiful chunked up ham here
that I'm gonna add
but again, as I mentioned at the beginning of the video,
I'm only gonna add it at the, right at the end.
I'm actually gonna add it as soon as I turn the heat off.
I'm gonna add that ham and then the soup's gonna be done.
I may top up with a little bit of water
to compensate for that bone but that is your ham bone soup.
Super hearty, beautiful meal in the fall or in the winter
or really for whenever.
Freezes amazing.
Hope you try it.
Thanks for tuning in.
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and we'll see you on the next episode.
(calm music)