How many times have you gone to a place like Costco or your local market an picked up a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken for a quick meal on the way home? If you are like me, it happens pretty frequently. After all, you are busy, the chickens can be pretty tasty and it requires almost no effort before you are eating something.
Is it as good as buying a chicken and preparing it yourself? Of course it’s not. But let’s be realistic, most of us don’t have time to prepare a whole chicken on a random Tuesday.
So you have your dinner, you enjoy the chicken and you are left with something that probably looks like this…
This is where post really begins. For the longest time I would do what you likely do today. Chuck that thing in the trash and go about my day.
Here is the thing though, I use chicken broth all the time all forms of cooking. Basically i was throwing away a fresh chicken so i could go spend money buying canned broth to use in my cooking.
So i decided to make my own broth and let me tell you the difference in taste is night and day. Just like with all cooking the key is all about control. You get to choose the ingredients that are appropriate for what you are trying to do.
For example, if the end result of this is going to be a chicken soup, you may want to toss in all kinds of things like carrots and celery to go along with the spices that will be mentioned below. In this this case i wanted something that was more of a cooking broth.
Here is what i used:
- Chicken Carcass
- Filtered Water – You don’t have to filter the water but i promise you it will taste better.
- Fresh Parsley from my Herb garden (About 3 bushy stems)
- One Shallot – Doesn’t need to be finely chopped
- Three Bay Leaves
- Onion Powder – Here is an amazon link to the one I used (Link)
- Garlic Powder – Here is an amazon link to the one I used (Link)
- Italian Seasoning – Here is an amazon link to the one i used (Link)
Now notice I didn’t give any detailed specifics on how much of each ingredients that I used. There will be other recipes that will require more precision, this is not one of them. Put ingredients that you like in, taste the broth and add more as needed. The whole point is that you can use something that you would normally throw away to create a product that is going to be superior to something you are likely buying already in the store.
Once you strain the soup, I highly recommend putting the broth into various small containers and freeze them. This allows you to only thaw what you need when cooking. This final step is less important if your goal is making soup.
So take a little extra time after you are done eating and use the rest of the bird to make broth. You will be saving money and ending up with a much better tasting product!
