Reply to need help making inexpensive chicken stock

Forum Index » Food, Cooking, and Restaurants

Reply to "need help making inexpensive chicken stock "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I keep a one-gallon ziploc bag in my freezer.  Whenever I have chicken bones/carcass/gelatin, I throw it in.  When the gallon bag is full, it's stock time.  That's enough for my 8-quart stock pot, which actually yields me between 5 and 6 quarts of stock.

I chop up vegetables to make a volume of about half of the bones.  50% onions, 25% carrots, 25% celery.  Plus a bunch of chopped garlic, a dozen or so whole peppercorns, a few whole juniper berries, maybe a clove or two, and a few sprigs each of thyme and rosemary.  Cover it all with cold water, which in my 8-quart pot means up to about 1 to 1.5 inch below the top.  Then bring it up low and slow, to a simmer.  This can take an hour or more.  Once it's simmering, I let it go, covered, all day and sometimes (if I got a late start) all night.  Skimming off the scum every so often--but if I only use already-roasted bones and scraps (no raw meat or bones), there's not that much scum.

At the end, I might touch up the flavor with more herbs (fresh or dried) or a few turns of black pepper.  I don't salt it, ever, until I'm actually using it in a dish.  That way I'm free to reduce it more later, use it to make demi glace, what have you, without having it get too salty from more reduction.

If you're making stock from a smaller amount, say with just one carcass, you still want the proportions to be, vegetables = about half the volume of bones, and vegetables to be (ideally, but it's stock, so you can be flexible) 50% onion, 25% carrot, 25% celery.  And enough cold water to cover it all plus about 1 inch.  21:26's recipe sounds about right, except don't bring to a full boil--just a simmer.  You don't want to boil your stock.

THREE IMPORTANT THINGS TO REMEMBER AT THE END:

1) When you're ready to get rid of the solids, strain it through a sieve or colander INTO ANOTHER POT.  I forgot once, and poured it into my colander in the sink, meaning I saved the solids and poured the stock down the drain.  Never forgotten it again.  
2) With a large quantity of stock, you need to take extra steps to cool it--it won't cool down on its own fast enough to prevent bacteria growth.  I pour it into a metal pot, and put that pot in a sink full of ice water (making sure the ice water doesn't slosh up over the sides into my stock).  If that's not enough to do it, I put some more ice water in a very small metal bowl, and float that bowl in the middle of my pot-o'-stock to provide further cooling.  Once it's cool, I can strain it again into jars.  I use quart jars with a canning funnel, and I strain it through a (clean) metal coffee basket.  
You don't have to get that fancy; cool it and strain it however you want, but do something to get it cool faster than it would on its own so you can store it and not have it be hot when you put it in the fridge.  
3)  In that cooling/straining process, DON'T USE ANYTHING GLASS.  You could crack or shatter the glass, ruining your stock.  [/quote]

thanks PP - 2more questions.  Do you put all bones in there, like if you serve chicken legs to your family (my kids love bbq chicken), or just if it stays off the plate?  simmering for hours would take care of any germ problem, but it seems a little odd to save people's bones.  also, do you smash the bones first or just toss em in?[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics