Make your own incredible chicken stock with the bones from the roasted chicken you whipped up. I save the carcass and all the left over bits of meat after carving the chicken then pop them into a large zip lock bag to save and make the stock the following weekend. You’ll need a few hours so I usually have mine simmering away while I do other odds and ends around the house.
Simmering Chicken Stock
In a large pot, add the chicken carcass, toss in chunks of onion, carrot, celery, parsley. An important tip for the onions. Try to find onions with a deep golden skin. The darker the dried skin color, the better. Use this dried skin in the broth, just cut up the onion, skin and all. The natural dye of the onion skin will deepen the color of your broth. It’s a good thing!
Next, cover with water and bring to a boil, then turn down the heat and let it simmer until the whole thing is pretty much falling apart. The veggies should be mush and the bones coming apart. Taste and season with salt & pepper to your liking. You can also intensify the flavor if you have bullion cubes or a broth base paste.
Chicken Stock
Strain the veggies and the bones. I use a large fine mesh sieve for the veggies, and push them down with the back of a spoon and swirl in the broth, this pushes more of the vegetable flavor into the stock.
Once your broth is strained, you can do the next step a few different ways. Pour it into a large container and let it chill overnight. The fat will rise to the top and you can scoop it off, then pour the broth into separate containers and freeze. Or, you could just pour the warm broth into the separate containers now, chill, scoop off the fat and freeze.
Enjoy!!
hi sara, my name is tim and i am a stock addict,,, not sure we have the whole twelve steps worked out yet. anyhow i fell off the wagon and read your chicken stock blog and loved it. i have a suggestion for any of your readers who make and use a lot of stock. i am nervous about putting stuff in the freezer in glass containers which might crack if the liquid expanded from freezing, but i should add that i’ve never seen this happen, so my fears are probably unjustified.
anyhow, my solution is to measure two or three cups of stock into a quart freezer bag (good quality bags to avoid leakage before it freezes) and freeze the bags on a cookie sheet so that they’re quite flat. after they’re frozen they stack beautifully, take up far less freezer space, and since they’re flat, they thaw much faster as well. the freezer bags also have the advantage of being very easy to write on with a black marker as to quantity, date, type of stock (such as chicken, turkey, rabbit, elk, deer, beef, or fish,,, told you i was an addict).
keep up the good work for your “food lovers”.
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Brilliant!! Send me some stock pls. Thanks though with the tip for not freezing glass. I didn’t think of it when we snapped the photo and used that batch of stock up. I don’t freeze glass either. I took the photo down and edited a bit so people aren’t confused. One things for sure, next batch of stock we’re going to try your method. THANK YOU!! 🙂
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