The Best Bone Broth

We have been making stock (or if you’re cool ‘Bone Broth’ – I’m not cool) for years. We buy whole organic chickens, and to make the most of the chicken and get our money’s worth we break them down ourselves (well my husband does) This is a super cost effective way to eat organic meat and breaking it down yourself and using the whole bird means you can keep waste to a minimum. 1 whole organic chicken make 2 x Marylands (thigh and drum) 2 breasts, 4 x chicken nibbles (which we save up then have a nibble party) and 1 carcass. We then use the left over carcass to make our own chicken stock. If you buy the Bostock chicken, as we do, then not only are you buying chicken that has been well looked after you can be assured that their staff are too (they get staff lunches and paid the living wage as a minimum) and as an added bonus their packaging is COMPOSTABLE! And you all know how much I like to compost.

To make the stock we used to use the chicken carcasses and then brought whole veg i.e. leeks, celery and carrots but most recently we have been saving our vege scraps in the freezer (think carrot, onions, garlic, celery, leeks, fennel, silver beet, herb stalks - so much flavour in the stalk) I even threw in the peelings from 1 apple in this batch just to make use of it! Not potato and kumara and the like – save those to make potato/kumara skin chips. Also Kale stalks are too bitter.  

Once you have a big container of veg scraps and some carcasses then you are ready to make stock. 

INGREDIENTS

This batch of stock uses 4 chicken carcasses (I keep them in the freezer until ready to use, we only break down 2 at a time) and a large container of vegetable scraps.

METHOD

1. Defrost the chicken carcasses then pop them into the bottom of a large saucepan.
2. Pop all of those beautiful veg and herb scraps on top – they don’t have to be defrosted.
3. Add a bit of salt if you like and some peppercorns (ok salt and pepper aren’t scraps but it’s ok I’ll forgive myself)

If you are vegetarian/vegan just use the frozen veg and herbs but follow the same technique.

4. Fill the pot with water so that the all of the scraps are just covered.
5. Pop on the hob and bring to the boil, once a lovely rolling boil has been reached pop on the lid, turn the hob down to its lowest setting (maybe move to the smallest ring) and leave to simmer away gently for a couple of hours. I often leave ours simmering for about 3 hours. If just using the veg, 1 hour is probably enough.
6. Once the hours have passed, turn off and leave to cool in the pot. You do not want to be draining HOT stock ok. It’s dangerous. Leave to cool for a couple of hours (lid off) so that when you drain, you don’t get scalded.
7. When cool enough to handle carefully pull out the carcasses and place on a plate to cool down. When cool, you can pick off any meat that is still on the bone – mix it with homemade mayo and make a sandwich. OH MY GOSH SO GOOD.
8. Drain the rest of the stock into a very large bowl, or another pot, through a mesh colander – give a push down with a potato masher to get out most of the liquid. If you have a lot of stock you might have to do this step in batches.
9. Pop the drained veg scraps into your compost or worm bin. If you have a bokashi bin then this is a great place to put the left over bone and veg, but if not, bone scraps otherwise need to go in the bin.
10. Once drained leave to cool again before transferring to containers.

If, like me, you reuse any plastic containers that come into your house a million times, you don’t want to be putting hot food or stock into those plastic containers in case it causes the plastic to leach nasties into your food. If you do still buy food in plastic containers (I buy the kids a lot of yoghurt) reuse the containers as much as possible. If I was to make my own yoghurt I would have to buy the milk in plastic any way as I don’t have a great glass bottle source, YET, so what’s the point at the moment when I don’t reuse milk containers but I do reuse the yoghurt containers. Which makes far more use of them then sending them to the recycling centre to either just be dumped in the landfill or to be recycled in to a lower quality plastic product. Any who I digress.

11. Use the stock straight away or freeze and use when needed. 

Stock is great for soups, broths, stews, gravy, cooking your barley or rice in for added flavour. AND YOU MADE THIS FOR FREE! (sorry for yelling) from food that otherwise would have been thrown out. Ka Pai.

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