You’ll never regret doing this. Pick a day when you’re a little bored and have a lot of time. Turn on some music, enter your kitchen and make broth! A really wild and crazy cook with lots of big pans might make several kinds of broth (pork? vegetable? chicken?) all on the same day, but most of us aren’t quite that hard-working. So pick chicken as your go-to (unless you’re a vegetarian, of course). Our friend, David (married to Frankie, my roommate from my junior year at Colorado College – oh so many years ago), says he only cooks by looking in the refrigerator and using what’s there. This is ideal for that.
Pick your biggest pot for the top of the stove. My mother gave me mine, saying that everyone needs a really big pot, and I’m still using it, probably 45 years later (fyi – it’s 6″ deep and 12″ across, but a slightly smaller one would work too). Once your chicken has cooked for hours and hours and has been cooled and strained, divide the broth into the perfect size (for you) freezer containers and freeze. I think 4 cups is ideal for 2 people and 2 cups for 1 person.
Homemade Chicken Broth
The next step may be controversial. I’ve adopted the Chinese way of putting the chicken in the pot (nothing else at this point), filling the pot with cold water, barely covering the chicken, bringing it all to a boil, letting it boil for about 2 minutes (it will get really nasty and foamy looking) and then dumping that all into a colander in the sink, rinsing everything, including the chicken and the pan, off, putting the cleansed chicken back into the cleansed pot, re-filling the pot with cold water until it barely covers the chicken, bringing the water back to a simmer, and then starting the real broth-cooking, adding the vegetables, etc. at that time. The only catch to this is that it’s very tricky and scary when you pour out the water, because the pan is heavy and hot. The advantage to this approach is that the time-consuming, slightly-annoying task of skimming off the scum for about 10 minutes has pretty much been alleviated.
If you don’t want to risk scalding yourself (or your dog who is beneath your feet, watching you), do this instead: barely cover the chicken with water, bring it all to a hardy boil, turn the heat down to a simmer, stir, and skim off the scum which comes to the surface until it quits coming. My mother would even take a paper towel and go around the edge of the pot to remove scum, so, of course, I do that too, if I’m using the scum-removing approach.
In either case, once your broth has had the scum removed, add lots of what you’ve got on hand. Parsley? check. Carrots? check. Celery? check. Onion? check. Same with garlic. Thyme? Oregano? perfect – about 1 tsp each. A leek? fabulous. Salt, of course. Start with about 1 T of kosher salt. Pepper – about 1 tsp. Tony Chachere’s Seasoning? YES! to taste. Bay leaves? 1 or 2. Or you could go the Asian route and add ginger, scallions, lemongrass, maybe some cilantro, a few slices of a jalapeno pepper, fish sauce, and/or star anise.
Simmer everything – with no lid or with a lid just partially on – for as long as you are willing, hopefully about 3 hours or more. Do NOT let it boil hard. I did that recently and ended with very cloudy stock. Add hot water, if necessary, to keep the chicken covered.
Then cool, strain, and freeze. FYI – my 4# of chicken backs yielded about 10 cups of broth.
Once cooled you’ll want to remove the fat that has come to the surface. If you do this after it’s been frozen, you’ll have to kind of scrape it off before it defrosts. I usually divide my broth into freezer containers, refrigerate it over night, remove the fat, and then freeze.
Recipe provided by BigLittleMeals and Andy & Ann