Homemade Chicken Stock

When my kitchen counter looks like this, you know I'm gearing up for something:

I do this so often that I don't even have a recipe for it. I will provide the guidelines given to me by my mother that were given to her by my great-grandmother, but, as in any good recipe, the rest is up to you. Therefore, this has components, rather than real ingredients.

• Chicken meat, pieces, bones, skin: You want pieces with lots of connective tissue, bones (especially roasted bones so a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store is great), wings & necks are good as they have lots of skin and such as well. This is going to give you the gelatin that makes for an excellent stock.
  
• Herbs: Entirely up to you, but you want to use what you have, what's easy and what's available. Any time I buy fresh herbs and veggies for a recipe, I add the parts I haven't used to my stock bag - I keep a freezer bag in the icebox full of everything from celery tops to parsnip & carrot pieces and leftover parsley. Then when I want to make stock, I just throw the contents of the bag into the pot with the chicken. It's nice not to waste a thing. Some herbs that are especially friendly to chicken are rosemary, dill, marjoram, parsley, thyme, sage and bay leaf. But just use what you have and what you like.
  
• Veggies: Contents of stock bag as well as other fresh stuff. Again, up to you but some good things to include would of course be the classic mirepoix of carrots, celery & onion. Also can use turnips, parsnips, leeks, garlic, shallots...
  
• Spices: I usually add black peppercorns. You also may want to play with other spices such as allspice and cloves (especially in winter).

Ok. Put whatever chicken you're using into the pot. Today, I'm using a stripped rotisserie chicken from Safeway as well as a big bag of frozen uncooked chicken wings.

Then add enough water to cover the chicken and put it on high heat to bring to a boil. While that's heating up, you want to start adding your veggies. I had a full stock bag in the freezer so I used all kinds of things: celery, carrots, a parsnip, leeks, onions, garlic and a small stalk of lemongrass (what, too much?).

Then add your spices - I put in a pretty generous handful of black peppercorns and called it a day.

Lastly, toss in any dried, fresh or frozen herbs you have on hand. I had leftover fresh parsley that I'd frozen, so I added all of that as well as tons of dried stuff: 3 bay leaves, rosemary, thyme, sage, celery seed & marjoram. In addition, since I'm planning to use my stock for matzoball soup, I added dill seed as well as lots of dill. Good matzoball soup always has tons of dill. But if you were making some other kind of soup, you would include herbs & spices that would work with those flavors. Anyway, when I was done, I had one full pot:

Once you've brought it to a boil, reduce the heat and keep it somewhere between simmer and boiling (depending on how closely you're willing to watch it). It will take at least 2-3 hours to cook, give or take. In the meantime, you'll see all this yellow liquid fat gather at the top:

That, is schmaltz (that's yiddish for "chicken fat"). Rendered chicken fat. Skim that off. You can use it in a lot of different ways. You can fry things in it, saute in it, hell some people even spread it on toast. Mine is going straight into the matzoballs (קניידלעך kneydlach) for my soup. Behold:



Ok, back to the stock. You know it's done when the meat is falling off the bone and everything looks completely pulverized and gross:

Now, just strain it through a very fine sieve, throw out the solids (you may want to resersve some chicken for your soup, or feed the chicken-soaked veggies to the dog) and you should have lovely lovely stock. At this point, you could just use it immediately in a million different recipes (soup, sauces, risotto, etc.) or you could freeze it and hang on to it for when you need it. I'm also not above just drinking it from a mug on a cold night.