your thoughts on refrigerated soup bases..

Thanks Abbie! I'll check out that option too...now I'm thinking that maybe I'll research making a clam base from scratch..we'll see..

I don't know iof you have this option but - our high end grocery makes fish and lobster stock on site and freezes it for sale - I often use that when I don't have my own available. Maybe a fish market would do that too?

inpat: I find More Than Gourmet's fish and seafood bases quite good. They are highly concentrated, and I do add more water to them than called for, but otherwise, there's not anything in them I wouldn't put in my homemade.

I guess I'm more interested in clam and seafood bases. I normally make my own chicken stocks and broths but don't have access to good fish and seafood as I used to. Thanks so much for everyone's input.

Interestingly, having answered this question I then went to the mailbox where the most recent Cook's magazine, where they've just re-reviewed chicken stocks. Their new preference is Swanson Chicken Stock (their prior Swanson Certified Organic... has been reformulated and went to the "not recommended" part of the list). They liked Better than Bouillon with some big reservations about the salt. They tested multiple batches of BB and found a VERY wide swing in the actual sodium content (did you know that labels can legally be as much as 20% off? that was news to me). So, they liked BB (especially for how it keeps and how little it costs to reconstitute) but recommended that it be diluted at a higher amount than BB suggests, simply to manage the saltiness.

Some of them are very good products. Others are just a mess of water, chemicals and flavoring. You need to check the ingredient list (and the sodium content) of each.

We use quite a bit of boxed chicken stock -- typically by the case from Costco. I use chicken stop in so many things that I truly can't make enough (and I save all my chicken carcasses and make stock on a regular basis), so -- yes -- it definitely has a place. I've found those "better than Boullion" types to be way too salty for me, so I don't use them. This is a bit old, but it has some good info: http://www.food.com/bb/viewtopic.zsp?t=316655