Round Two of Getting to Know My Chicken Dinner (or, My First Attempt at Making Chicken Stock)

A week or so ago, I shared my first attempt at de-boning a whole chicken that was more like a wrestling match than a warm-up for dinnertime. Well that was more like Round One, and fortunately, Round Two went much better. Quite a success, really!

Round One: De-Boning the Chicken Meat

Round Two: Making Chicken Stock

Once I'd gotten over the calamity of the de-boning itself, I found myself with a tupperware full of chicken bones and left-over meat that I wouldn't be using to cook with. I shoved the tupperware in the freezer, figuring I'd had enough of a culinary workout for the day.

Part of the whole reason I'd decided to buy a whole chicken in the first place was because people raved about using it to make your own chicken stock. "So Easy!" "So Delicious!" "Much Healthier!" "So Cheap!"

It was about a month later before I got up the courage to try to attempt the chicken stock experiment. I did some research online, and it seemed as though you couldn't really go wrong with what you pitch in the pot. There often weren't any exact measurements for the stock recipes I found, so I figured how hard could this be to mess up?

Armed with a couple stalks of celery, some whole carrots, two cobs from last night's corn-on-the-cob, a potato, onions, garlic, salt and pepper, I threw them all in the pot with the defrosted carcass. Poured in water, until it was just covering the chicken, and let the stove top work its magic.

I let the pot simmer for about an hour, until the juice was a consistent color of light brown and clear of any fat. I took a sip and it tasted pretty good. Another sip, and I started to suspect that maybe this thing actually worked...

I drained out the liquid and decided to freeze it, ladling it by the 1/2 cup into small tupperware and into ice cube trays (1/8 cup per ice-cube section, I determined). For a whole day, I froze batch after batch of my homemade chicken stock, which you can see just a fraction of in the photo above. My one single chicken and few measly veggies produced more than 6 cups worth of homemade stock. (I didn't count, so that's just based on what I have left now!)

It's for this reason alone that I haven't given up on the "whole-chicken" idea. Able to control what I put into the stock (organic veggies and pasture-raised chicken), as well as seeing it simmer in my own kitchen and reap more than enough for my humble cooking needs, make the whole process—even the discouragement of Round One—feel like a win.

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