Instant Pot Ham Bone Soup Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Is an Instant Pot good for making soup? ›

Sometimes that's great, infusing our home with delicious smells and warmth, but a lot of the time, we're craving soup NOW. Enter: the Instant Pot. It can make delicious, hands-off soup, usually in just under an hour. Check out our best Instant Pot soups, stews, and chilis—you'll be feeling all warm and cozy in no time.

Ham bones leftover from a city or country ham make a rich and comforting broth that works well as the backbone for rich soups or comforting risotto. You can also try cooking winter greens like collards or kale in ham broth for a tender, flavorful side dish.

The bone can be stored in the fridge, well wrapped for up to 3 days. The ham bone can also be frozen for up to 3 months. We don't even defrost it when making this soup, just place it in the water and add about 15-20 minutes to the cooking time.

You can thicken soup by adding flour, cornstarch, or another starchy substitute. For the best results, never add flour or cornstarch directly to your soup. If you do, it will clump up on top. Instead, ladle a small amount of broth into a separate bowl and let it cool.

Yes, if you are using meat and dried beans and/or lentils as the pressure cooker cuts down on cooking time dramatically! For other soup vegetables not so much unless you're in a hurry, when it would speed things up. Otherwise the slow cooker is a better option for long slow cooking.

However, do not add onions, carrots, celery or herbs to your initial pot of simmering bone broth. Instead, enjoy the pure, rich flavor that comes from just the bones, fat, connective tissue and any small amount of meat that may still be on the bones; it is not something that needs or wants amending.

Beef bone broth: Use grass-fed beef bones. The best ones to use for beef broth are meaty bones and bones that have a lot of tissue and cartilage or marrow like oxtail, shanks, and knuckles. Pork bone broth: For pork broth, ribs and the neck bones work well, as well as cartilage-rich pig's feet.

To make a nutritious and delicious beef bone broth, we recommend using beef marrow bones or beef oxtails. These bones contain lots of marrow, and unlike other beef bones, the marrow in the femur is easy to access.

Instead, freeze the ham bone so you can use it later to add flavor to a soup or make homemade ham broth or stock. A ham bone will keep in the freezer for at least a few months. That buys you some time to make full use of it and you have a few days to properly prepare it for long-term storage.

Although you may be able to use a ham bone again for soup, if not all of the meat comes off of the bone, most of the flavor you can get from the bone will be used up the first time you use it to make soup. If you want to try to reuse the bone, refrigerate it and use it again within a couple of days.

Is it better to thicken soup with flour or cornstarch? ›

It's important to note that cornstarch has twice the thickening power of flour. If you need to substitute cornstarch to thicken liquid in a recipe that calls for ¼ cup (four tablespoons) flour, you only need two tablespoons cornstarch.

A ham bone and ham hock are two different parts of the pig. Ham bones typically come from the leg, while ham hocks come from the shank or bottom part of the leg, close to the ankle. Ham hocks are typically sold cured and smoked, so they provide more flavor than ham bones.

Heavy cream

Use heavy cream as a keto-friendly thickening option for your soups and broths. Heavy cream has more fat than regular whole milk, so you can add it to your soup recipes without worrying about it curdling.

Simmering animal bones in water releases collagen and other proteins into the broth that may have health benefits, although more research is needed to validate these claims. Now, a new study has shown that ham bones contain peptides that could have cardioprotective effects.

If you are cooking dried pinto beans, white beans, black beans, lentils or split peas, the ham bone will add so much. After soaking the dried beans overnight, drain them and cover them with fresh water. Add the ham bone, some chopped onion, salt, pepper and any other seasoning that you like.

Bone marrow stock is a healthy and economical way to build up your immune system and increase the good bacteria in your gut. At our storefront, choose from packages of chicken backs, chicken stock packages, chicken feet, beef marrow bones, or ham bones to make your stocks or broths.