I Asked 4 Chefs To Name the Best Store-Bought Beef Broth (And They All Disagreed)

At the first hint of frost, I lean into soup season full tilt. The ultimate cozy, savory, most satiating soup of all time? The iconic French onion soup. Its entire backbone is beef broth, so your soup is only as good as the broth or stock you use. While making broth from scratch is always preferred, ready-to-use beef broth offers unmatched convenience.

Unwilling to risk a sub-par sip of my favorite seasonal soup, I asked four chefs to share their preferred store-bought beef broth. As it turns out, too many chefs in the kitchen meant nobody could agree on the same brand.

One thing they were all aligned on, however, is that salt control is crucial. Heavily seasoned beef broth limits your ability to dial back the saltiness in order to balance other ingredients or reduce the liquid into a concentrated sauce without over-salting. 

Broth vs. Stock vs. Bone Broth

The grocery aisle is lined with cartons and cans labeled broth, stock, and bone broth, and the terms are often used interchangeably. But they aren’t the same:

• Broth is lighter, made by simmering meat and aromatics for up to a few hours. Typically seasoned with salt, it's designed to shine on its own in soups.
• Stock is richer, made primarily from bones, simmered for six to eight hours, usually unseasoned or lightly salted, meant as a base ingredient or reduced to a sauce.
• Bone broth is essentially stock simmered even longer, typically 24 to 48 hours, yielding more collagen, a thicker texture, and higher nutrient concentration. Commercial bone broths are often salted for sipping as-is. 

Chefs habitually reach for the most intensely flavored, lowest-sodium options available, like a low-sodium bone broth, giving them better control over seasoning.

The Experts I Asked

• Jared Forman: Chef and owner of Deadhorse Hill in Worcester, Massachusetts
• Esther Reynolds: Recipe developer and food writer
• Sasha Coleman: Food stylist and chef de cuisine at Comfort Kitchen in Dorchester, Massachusetts
• Rebecca Schlosberg, MS, RDN: Baker and culinary dietitian; @madewithoutbybecca on Instagram

The Best Beef Broths, According to Experts

Forman, like most chefs, always recommends homemade stocks and broths, whether beef, chicken, or vegetable. He likes the ability to simmer the bones long enough so the broth is "almost viscous with gelatin from broken down collagen—it's liquid gold." When a stock from scratch isn't in the cards, he suggests Brodo Beef Bone Broth from award-winning chef Marco Canora.

Forman says, "Manora does things the right way, using the right ingredients," like fresh whole-cut organic vegetables and meaty beef bones from 100% grass-fed animals raised on pasture, sourced from cooperatives and family farms. He especially values the lower sodium content, explaining that, "as a chef, you want to have control over the salt in your recipes. We don't use salted butter either. We want to season at our own discretion."

Reynolds is loyal to Organic Better Than Bouillon Reduced Sodium Roasted Beef Base. "I find the flavor to be superior to boxed stocks and really appreciate that I can control the intensity and saltiness by using more or less as needed," she says. "I also like that I can keep it in the fridge for many moons, compared to an opened box of stock that I'd have to toss within a week."

In addition to stews, braises, and soups, she'll add a dab to stir-fries for extra depth. While she'd prefer to use homemade beef broth from scratch, she'll use the bouillon base "if it's there as one of many ingredients and not the main flavor." But for something like "beef pho, when the bulk of what you're tasting is the broth itself," she insists, it's homemade or bust.

Chef Coleman is a self-proclaimed broth fanatic: "I love to sip on it, add a lil' beer to it to make it filling, cook with it, [or just] deglaze a pan with it...I love anything broth!" She only reaches for store-bought broth when she can't make it from scratch and has run through her entire freezer stash. (Desperate times call for desperate measures.) When that's the case, she advises to "stay away from anything high-sodium," and usually uses Less-Sodium Swanson Beef Broth, which uses yeast extract for amplified savory flavor.

Schlosberg often relies on store-bought broth. Unless she's recently made a roast chicken or Thanksgiving turkey, she doesn't have bones to use to make her own bone broth. She opts for a lower-sodium option, Kettle & Fire Reduced Sodium Classic Beef Bone Broth with "its easy-to-open packaging and the fact that it's made from... grass-fed beef bones." As both a baker and a culinary dietician, she's especially mindful of the sodium and looks for options under 400mg per serving. Since Schlosberg rarely uses the whole container at once, she recommends pouring the remainder into ice cube trays, freezing, and using them for soups, pasta dishes, or in a mug to sip.