Easiest to make instead of buy: Homemade Stock

When Fall arrives, I start making chicken stock again. Homemade chicken stock tastes better and is far more nutritious than anything you can buy at the grocery store. And it's super easy to make. Really, I promise. Basically throw stuff in a pot and let it simmer....and enjoy the smells all day. Strain and freeze. 

Chicken, garlic, onion, celery, carrots, herbs, peppercorns....add salt later after tasting.

The biggest revelation for me was learning that I didn't need to peel things or chop them small. Just quarter that onion and throw it in (remove produce stickers and wash off any visible dirt, of course). Chop a head of garlic in half and add it. Throw in some carrot peels. This is going to simmer all day, and the peels will add a lovely color to the stock. If you plan ahead, you can have a Stock Bag all ready to go! Use of a Stock Bag is quite thrifty and can add a wonderful depth of flavor because of the vegetable variety. I should caution you not to add purple cabbage, though, unless you want Barney-colored broth as my neighbor Abby discovered, much to her chagrin.

Making homemade stock -- especially if you use a Stock Bag -- is a wonderful way to Use It All! Here in America, we throw away vast quantities of edible food, and our house is (sadly) no exception, though we've cut waste dramatically in the last few years. Small changes make a difference! So if you have a few mushrooms that need to be used, but don't fit tonight's menu...toss them in the stock bag. Don't wait till it goes off and chuck it in the compost: SAVE IT in the freezer until you can USE IT.

The addition of some giblets to this batch produced a very small amount of foam which is easily removed. 

So...I never use fresh chicken for stock (except for giblets when I have them). Instead, when I roast a chicken (or very occasionally cook bone-in breasts or other parts), I save the carcass/bones in a plastic bag in the freezer and use those to make the stock. Most of the nutrition in homemade stock comes from the bones. You can put them on a sheet and roast them first for a richer color/flavor for the stock, but I am all about easy, so I never do this and my stock never suffers from flavor deficiency. We did make stock with a fried turkey carcass once and it was delish!

Note: if you do use fresh chicken, you'll want to put it in a pot of cold water, bring it gently to a simmer, and scoop off the foam, or "scum", that forms on the top. This foam is not harmful, but it will make your stock cloudy. So remove, Then add veggies and continue to simmer. 

Here is the "recipe" I use:

1-2 chicken/turkey carcass(es), including giblets if available (excluding the liver)
Good glug of vinegar (to leach nutrients from the bones)

Bag of vegetable trimmings

Add quartered/halved fresh veggies if necessary -- I make sure to have roughly equal parts of onions, carrots and celery, and then I add some garlic

 -- other veggies that work well include mushrooms, leeks, fennel, tomatoes, any greens, broccoli, zucchini, squash...you get the idea

Add fresh herbs if you have them (parsley, thyme are my favorites)

Add a shake of peppercorns

Add a bay leaf or two

Start it cold and slowly bring it up to a gentle simmer. It won't hurt it it it boils, but the "low and slow" will give you clearer stock in the end. Simmer for several hours stirring/tasting regularly. If you like, you can let the bones sit in cold water/vinegar for a half hour or so to pull even more calcium, gelatin and other nutrients from the bones. Once it has been simmering for an hour or so, I start to taste and add salt sparingly as it cooks. I do not add salt at the beginning because there are generally trace amounts on the carcasses from when I cooked them the first time. I prefer a lower-sodium broth, since I can always add salt based on what I'm making with it. Taste as you go to learn how the flavor develops!

Here you can see the stock after simmering for about five hours. The broth is developing a lovely color and the vegetables are quite soft. By now, little bits of meat will also float off the chicken bones and the carcass will come apart when I lift it with the spoon. This photo was taken at 4:30, so this stock will cook another hour or two until dinnertime, but I could certainly stop here if I wished.

When you decide it is done, turn off the heat and let it cool. Strain it through a colander, and put it in the refrigerator. The next day, you'll see that any excess fat will congeal on the surface in the fridge, so you can just scoop it off the next day. Sometimes I've made stock that had a jello-like consistency when cooled -- this is very nutritious and great for soup when someone is sick!

The final step is to strain it through cheesecloth and portion it into containers for the freezer. Nowadays I use wide-mouth glass jars instead of ziplock or plastick (just don't tighten the lids).

You can make vegetable stock by leaving out the meat. Ask at your grocery or market for beef bones or fish bones to make other types of stock.

Besides delicious soup, use your stock instead of (or half and half with) water when making rice, use it to make risotto, pan sauces,  use in mashed potatoes with 2% milk instead of cream, cook veggies in stock, sub for wine in pasta sauce, it is liquid gold baby!!

Stocking Up

So you're feeling all thrifty and culinarily advanced, making homemade stock in your kitchen. Maybe you're even kickin' it super-frugal old-school like your gramma and saving your veggie bits in a stock bag. Homemade stock is really easy, tastes incredible (especially compared to the high-sodium stuff from the store), makes your house smell great, and saves money. But you still need to be able to store it.

Stock "brick" sits easily, is compact, and easy to defrost in a bowl.

Like most people, I freeze my stock. I used to take the "flat bag" approach, but in my freezer approximately 10% of bags get mysteriously punctured. The only way to know which is to defrost and see if they leak! It took about a dozen episodes of losing half a bag of my lovely stock in the sink or microwave or fridge to decide to always use a container "just in case." Well, there's no easy way to put a flat bag in a bowl to catch any leakage! Now, if you have the perfectly organized freezer where you never toss items around and you also know you never, ever overfill your bags, then flat bags may work for you. Ditto for glassware. I prefer "stock bricks" myself.

Shown here just out of the freezer.

Filling 8-10 bags and fitting them into a 9X13 pan is easier (in my experience) than trying to freeze them flat. I can fit 8 bags with 3 cups each into a 9X13 and the other 2-4 in a saver of some sort. I do my best to make sure fluid is distributed evenly so they don't stick together (see photo above). I pull them out of the freezer after a day or so, separate them and store them back in the freezer. If any are stubborn, I let them sit on the counter for 5 minutes or so.  You could run them under cool running water for a minute to separate, then stick them back in the freezer.

I used to freeze in smaller quantities, but I use more stock nowadays because it's a really wonderful way to add flavor. When I defrost, any extra goes into a mason jar in the fridge for use that week.

I am still using the plastic baggies. I would love a re-usable (or at least recyclable) alternative for freezing stock, so if you have a better option, please let me know. For now though, even with the baggies, my taste buds, my health, my budget and my planet come out ahead with homemade stock. Try some today!

Stock is Cheap

Oh did you think I was going to dole out investing advice?  Nay, nay, not so but far otherwise.  Take me to my natal shore and the white cliffs of Albion.....oh wait, sorry, I got distracted.

Today's tip is the Stock Bag for the freezer.  You can compost all those end pieces of onions, carrot peelings and leafy celery tops, but it's an even better idea to use them to make your own stock.  You know how sometimes the inside of a garlic bulb is just those teeny-tiny cloves that are impossible to peel?  Cut them in half and throw them in your stock bag. Don't worry about the skin!  How about that one squash that got hidden in the drawer and is fine but a little shriveled?  Stock bag!  And don't forget to go through your fridge and toss in anything that you aren't going to be able to use that week.  Any vegetables will work!  The bonus is that your stock will taste like the season.

When my bag is full, I decide what kind of stock I need.  For vegetable stock, I usually take a look at what's in the bag and round it out with an extra carrot or half an onion (again, resist the urge to peel off the skin!) and a potato.  I add some herbs (if they're not already in the bag) and some peppercorns and let the whole thing come to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer until it tastes right.  I do taste throughout and add a little salt.

For chicken stock, I don't use fresh chicken.  That seems incredibly wasteful to me.  Besides, if you use fresh chicken, you have to cook that first and skim the top of the water multiple times before adding the vegetables.  If you roast a chicken and use the carcass to make the stock, you can just dump it and the stock bag into a big pot with water and, again, herbs, peppercorns and bring to a boil.  Add a splash of white vinegar to leach calcium from the bones and let it gently simmer all day.  Taste and add salt as needed. 

When it's done, let it cool, then strain it.  One word of advice: do not put it in the refrigerator with the plan of straining it next day.  You will have to reheat it before straining and it will be cloudy.  And, well, why add all that work?  Often I will strain it in a colander and put it in the fridge and then strain through cheesecloth the next day when separating it to freeze.  That really doesn't add any extra steps for me.

I generally freeze mine in two- and four-cup portions in plastic, but am on the hunt for paper cups that will hold at least 1.5-2 cups.  I plan to freeze those on a cookie sheet, same as I do with the baggies, then put them in a larger container for deep-freeze storage.  Oh, and that Stock Bag itself?  It's a perfect candidate for re-use.  

Update: I now freeze stock in jars since I've built up a good stash. Do not tighten the lids until after the jars are frozen. Works wonderfully!!

So, start your Stock Bag today and plan to make some low-sodium, homemade stock yourself.  It's the perfect touch for making soup or giving rice a boost without extra butter.  And best of all, it's incredibly easy and doesn't take much time.  

And special thanks to my mother-in-law for this tip.  It's not something she does herself, but something her mother used to do and I'm awfully glad she shared it with me!