By Karen Sorenson
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My latest cooking adventure was Homemade Crockpot Chicken Stock. I have been reading a lot lately about the benefits of bone broth/stock and I wanted to try making some. Bone broth/stock is packed with vitamins, minerals, and gelatin (which helps with joint pain). While the store bought chicken broth is convenient, it is a processed food item that contains A LOT of sodium. Making your own allows you to control the ingredients and plus it’s pretty easy to make!
I used the following ingredients for the Homemade Chicken Stock:
The bones and carcasses of 2 cooked chickens (I used the bones leftover from two (3 lb) roasted chickens)
2 small onions
1 carrot
The inner ribs and leaves of 1 stalk of celery (plus leftover end pieces and leaves–use what you have available)
2 sprigs of fresh rosemary
3 sprigs of fresh thyme
10 cups of water
1 Tbsp Apple Cider Vinegar (ACV)
Cut the onions and carrot in half. Place the carcasses/bones, ACV, veggies, rosemary, and thyme in the crockpot. Cover everything with water (I used 10 cups-make sure you leave some space at the top). Cook on LOW for 8-12 hours. Allow the broth to cool and strain the broth through a mesh strainer lined with cheesecloth (optional). Refrigerate, allowing the fat to settle to the top and skim the solidified fat.
You are left with nutritious bone stock that tastes even better than store bought! Freeze or store in the fridge (see note below for storage suggestions).
Net Carb Count*:
Estimated to be 1 net carb for 1 cup of stock
*Note carb counts are estimated based on the products I used. Check nutrition labels for accurate carb counts.
Comments: I used the bones and carcasses leftover from chickens I had previously roasted. A good tip is to place all of your leftover chicken bones in a plastic freezer bag and store the bag in the freezer until you are ready to make stock. Anytime you make bone-in chicken (breast, thighs, legs, whole, etc.) save the bones and add it to the bag. I usually have celery to snack on, but I don’t like eating the celery hearts (small, light green ribs of the celery stalk) so I used those in this recipe. You can save your raw veggies scraps and those veggies that aren’t perfect for your dinner recipe and use them for broth/stock. Just store your veggies the freezer in a plastic freezer bag and add all of your veggie scraps to the bag. The vegetables are good for making bone broth or vegetable broth. It’s great tip for not letting anything go to waste! Also, I cooked my chicken stock overnight and woke up to deliciousstock in the morning.
In this recipe I made stock and without the addition of salt. I chose to leave out the salt so that I can control the amount that is used in my recipes. You could add it to your mixture while cooking, but *WARNING* make sure you figure out the amount of salt per serving. You don’t want to end up with more per serving than store bought!
STORAGE: To store the chicken stock, I saved about 2 cups of stock in a mason jar for use this week. The stock should last about 3 days in the fridge. The stock you store in the fridge will turn into a gelatin like substance. This is good! It means that there is a lot of healthy, joint healing gelatin in your stock. Heat will turn the gelatin back into liquid form when you use it in your recipes. What do you do with the other 8 cups? I poured it into ice cube trays, let them freeze, and stored the cubes in containers labeled with theserving size (I made 1 and 2 cup servings.) My ice cube trays hold about 2 cups of stock, but make sure you measure how much yours will hold so you can label the servings properly. The ice cube shape makes it faster for the stock to defrost. Also, each one of my cubes is about 2 Tbsp worth of stock so it’s easy to measure (yours may be different). If you don’t want to mess with ice cube trays you could freeze the stock in individual serving sizes, but be sure to label the container so you how much chicken stock it contains (I recommend 1 or 2 cup servings).
When making thestock you can optionally add 1 Tbsp of apple cider vinegar to the bones to help extract extra minerals. Pour the vinegar over the bones and wait 30 minutes before adding the other ingredients and starting the stock.
I’ve written a lot of info here, but it really was easy to make because the crockpot does all the work. It is a good way to use all of your ingredients and to not be wasteful. Plus you get all of those vitamins and minerals! I hope you try it out because I loved the rich flavor that was produced from the homemade stock!
Need recipes using chicken broth/stock? Do a search in my blog for chicken broth and it will bring up lots of great recipes that use chicken broth.
Want more info about the benefits of bone broth? http://www.marksdailyapple.com/cooking-with-bones/#axzz1vp6uEuQ7discusses the benefits of bone broth.
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