Chicken Stock
By using the leftovers from a roast chicken dinner to make your own stock, you’ll be able to have tasty stock with a much lower salt content, save money and get more use out of your food. Stock up on this stock!
Minimum salt, maximum taste.
Ready made stock pots from the shops might taste nice, but they are insanely high in salt content. And really, what makes food exciting, is flavour. Not just tons and tons of salt. Salt, as I mention in this week’s blog post on water retention, is something we get too much of, in many parts of the world (not just an issue in Western cooking). With your own homemade stock, you can squeeze out as much flavour as possible from your chicken carcass and vegetables and herbs, and play around with how low you can get the salt content without it getting too bland, of course.
Homemade Chicken Stock
Makes over 1 litre
Prep time: 10 minutes | Cook time: roughly 2 hours | Cool time: 30 mins +
Leftovers from a roast chicken (rotisserie chicken from the shops are likely too salty, so this refers to a homemade roast!): all the bits, every bit of leftover meat, bone and skin
Roughly 3 cups of leftover (or raw!) vegetables: celery, carrot, onion, garlic, beet root, sprouts, celeriac, swede (you don’t need all of these, whatever you have is good!)
Fresh or dry thyme, rosemary and/or sage
2-3 bay leaves
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp peppercorns
Optional: celery salt, onion salt (cut down on regular salt if using)
1 litre water (about 5 cups)
Instructions
You can do this in a large saucepan on the hob or in an Instant Pot. If you have an Instant Pot, you can check out my video on how I make this here - or keep following these instructions.
Pour roughly 5 cups (around 1 litre) of water in your pan. You can place a steam rack in the pan if you want, but it’s not essential - you can just chuck everything in. Put in everything you have leftover from the roast chicken, bones, meat and skin, and all the leftover vegetables you have. If you don’t have much veg left, just roughly chop up some raw stuff (carrots, celery etc) and put it in. I definitely recommend adding some extra onion and garlic if you don’t have any of that in your leftovers.
Drizzle over salt, peppercorns and seasoning, and pop in a few bay leaves. If using an Instant Pot, put the lid on and shut the valve, and set the timer to 1 hour. For a normal saucepan, bring it to a simmer with a lid on on the hob and keep an eye on it (stay in the vicinity!) as it simmers for about 2 hours. You can let it cook longer, the more you can get the ingredients broken down the better for the flavour! It depends how much time you have.
At the end, put a colander on top of a bowl or pan that can hold all the liquid in the pan. Pour everything into the colander. Then, run the liquid through a fine sieve - ideally a couple of times - to get rid of all small bits of bone and peppercorns etc. It should run as clear as possible, obviously some herbs and bits of vegetable will remain. If you are worried about small bones you can also run it all through a nut bag or something really fine, but this might get rid of a lot of the good stuff too.
Let it cool down completely and then store in a bottle or jars, or even small pots, in your fridge and freezer. Ready to have at hand for whenever you need stock! This is much lower in salt and is perfect for almost any kind of cooking. Honestly the list is endless: soups, use it instead of oil for gentle sautéing, add to a sauce… I use this so, so much in my cooking and it adds lots of great flavour. That’s better than just throwing out a chicken carcass, isn’t it!
Vegans and vegetarians: obviously you can use a pretty similar method for vegetable stock! Use all your leftover veg and make big batches of stock, cutting down on salt in vegetable stock is really good too. And obviously without a chicken in there you don’t need to worry about small bones. Bonus!
I would love to see your stock! What did you add? And how are you using it? Share your result with me on Instagram and tag @TheFromScratchBody and hashtag #TheFromScratchBody so I don’t miss it!
