Advertising persistently promises that just one small bouillon cube will give the dish an unprecedented taste and unique aroma, indistinguishable from the smell of natural high-quality meat. Knowing how and from what these food concentrates are made will help to conclude whether small cubed broth can replace whole chicken or appetizing beef bone broth.
The history of the bouillon cubes themselves begins in 1883 - it was then that the Swiss entrepreneur Julius Maggi came up with a way to preserve concentrated meat broths in a dried form. The purified and boiled product of the hydrolysis of minced meat and bones in acid was mixed with fat, salt, vegetables and spices, and then pressed. The result was "Maggi's Golden Cubes" - an extremely cheap and affordable product for all segments of the population. In 1947, Maggi and Company merged with Nestlé.
Ways to preserve meat broths for a long time were invented before - the most famous is "Liebig's meat extract", the production of which began in 1865. For the production of the extract invented by the chemist Justus Liebig, natural beef broth was used, boiled and repeatedly filtered. "Meat extract" was purchased mainly for the needs of the army, but it did not gain wide popularity - the product obtained when it was dissolved was edible, but nothing more. According to the testimony of contemporaries, the strong smell of ammonia killed all the taste.
In the Soviet Union, bouillon cubes, made exclusively from natural products, did not gain much popularity. Cubes began to be widely used since the beginning of the nineties, when Nestlé and Knorr products flooded the market.
The current recipe for bouillon cubes has gone far from the idea of being 100% natural. They contain extracts of vegetable proteins, the same hydrolyzate of meat in hydrochloric acid, a large amount of salt, fat, usually vegetable, starch, chopped dried vegetables, flavorings and flavor enhancers.
The recognizable golden color of the broth is achieved through the addition of vegetable fat and a dye - riboflavin, also known as vitamin B2. However, do not rejoice - there is little benefit from the vitamin in the cube.
The main component of bouillon cubes is common table salt. Its share can be up to 50-60 percent of the mass of the whole cube. Although manufacturers indicate on the packaging of the product that natural meat is also included in the composition, its quantity can hardly be called anything but insignificant.
The well-known monosodium glutamate gives the compressed concentrate its characteristic aftertaste. In addition to this flavoring additive, the cube may contain many more different "enhancers" and "enhancers" of taste.
The broth obtained by dissolving a cube in boiling water has nothing to do with rich meat broth - its nutritional value tends to zero, but it is very easy to get gastritis with regular eating with such soups. In fact, bouillon cubes were and remain a product for emergencies, not for everyday meals.
