Simple Chicken Broth From Whole Chicken Scraps

So you just finished quartering a chicken and you’re about to throw out the carcass. STOP! You can get more use out of it! How? By making a chicken broth from whole chicken scraps! Chicken broth is something that I use in a lot of soup recipes, simmering meat in, and is a great way to add flavor to rice and couscous. In case you’re wondering there is a difference between chicken stock and chicken broth.

Chicken Stock vs. Chicken Broth

A Chicken Stock is made from slow cooking the bones. It is actually not easy to make a pure stock in the home since it requires you to remove all meat from the bone to get the richness and texture from the gelatin that gets released in the bones during the cooking period.

Chicken Broth is made from slow cooking the meat. Broths tend to have more flavor because of the meat and additional seasoning, yet rather  than a stock,  will have less body because of the lack of bones.

A Hybrid Approach

Since we’re using the remains of a whole chicken, this broth technically is a hybrid and gives you the best of both worlds. Not to mention it’s easy to put together since you don’t need to spend time trying to strip meat from the both. You’re just throwing all the extra pieces into the crock pot!

There’s usually parts I rarely use when quartering a chicken. The giblets, neck, and wings. These are perfect elements to adding flavor and body since the wings are full of colagen.

Seasoning

I tried to make this broth as simple as possible, to keep prep time down to a minimum. A lot of traditional will add vegetables into the broth like celery, carrots, and sometime fennel. In my opinion, although it tastes great this way, I feel like it starts to move away from what a chicken broth should be and becomes more of a vegetable/chicken broth. This also means you have to spend time chopping up these ingredients and considering the time it needs to cook, odds are you’re going to be doing this early in the morning and need to rush out of the house to work, or get the kids out the door for school.

So I stripped this recipe down to the essentials: Garlic. Onion. Salt. Peppercorn. Chicken. Water.

What Do I do with the scraps?

Well the broth is done and it’s all strained, But now you have a bunch of meat left over so what do you do with it?

Give it to the beast.

She has a face only a mother could love!

Simple Chicken Stock From Whole Chicken Scraps

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Cook Time: 8 hours

Total Time: 8 hours 5 minutes

Servings: 6 quarts

Crock Pot chicken broth from whole chicken scraps, using a simple seasoning of garlic peppercorn onion and salt. Great way to get use out of a whole chicken carcase

Print Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 whole frying chicken scraps
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 dried bay leaves
• 1 tbsp peppercorns
• 2 tbsp salt
• 1 whole onion
• 4-6 quarts water depending on how much liquid your crock pot can hold

Instructions

• Dump everything you didn't use from a whole chicken into a crock pot
  
• Add salt, peppercorns, coarsely chopped onion and garlic. Drop in a couple bay leaves
  
• fill the crock pot up with water. Set crock pot on low for about 8-10 hours.
  
• When it's ready, pour the contents through a strainer. You may need to do it twice if you're using something not as fine like what i'm using.
  
• Store it in containers, and throw them in the freezer for up to 6 months, or in the fridge for about a week.