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Chicken Broth

Category: Soups

Author: The Savvybearcat

Date: 1/1/2007

Rating:

(3.0) by 1 users

Ingredients:

1 Stewing chicken (or 2 broilers and a stick of butter)
16 cup Water
1 large Yellow onion
1 Bay leaf
1 Parsley bunch
1 Thyme bunch, fresh (or a teaball with about 1/2 t dried thyme inside)

Instructions:

Take one large, heavy, lidded pan; mine is a six-quart enamelled
cast-iron Copco pan with 20 years' good cooking already logged, and I
live in terror that yuppie burglars will break into my house some
night and steal it. Put into it one fat old chicken. If you live in
a part of the world where there are no fat old chickens for sale, put
in two scrawny young chickens and a stick of butter.

Put the pan in a cold oven, turn the temperature to 325 degrees F.
and wait patiently, doing nothing whatsoever to the chicken, for
about four hours, till it's dark golden.

Take the pot out of the oven and let it cool to room temperature.
Strip the meat off the bones. Cover everything, meat and bones, with
about a gallon of water at room temperature. Add a raw onion, peeled
and quartered, a bay leaf, a bunch of parsley tied together with
string, and a small bunch of thyme similarly tied or a teaball with
dried thyme leaves in it. Bring the water up to a simmer and let it
just simmer (make a mirror, as the French say) for ten minutes. Turn
it off and return it to room temperature again.

Take the meat out. It is not as good as it was before the wee
simmer, but perfectly satisfactory for chicken salad or on waffles
with creamed chicken or whatever. Waste not want not.

Add another quart of water, bring the broth back up to a simmer and
simmer it for twenty minutes. Strain out the bones and vegetables.
You should have about four quarts.

NOTES:

* Rich homemade chicken broth -- Surely people who make use of
bouillon cubes have no idea how easy home-made broth can be. This is
not a traditional method, but it produces good results.

* I've never had good luck freezing broth (it starts to taste
thinnish), so this is as much as I ever make at once. I keep it in
the refrigerator in quart Mason canning jars. I've read that you
should simmer saved broth for twenty minutes every four or five days,
but it never lasts that long in my house, so I can't comment.

* I use a cup wherever a recipe calls for a cup of chicken broth. And
then, after it's been around for a day or two, somebody suggests we
really haven't had chicken soup with rice for a long, long time... or
matzoh dumplings... or tortellini in brodo... and then it's all gone.

: Difficulty: easy.
: Time: about 6 hours, most of it waiting.
: Precision: no need to measure.

: Mary-Claire van Leunen
: Digital Equipment Corporation, Systems Research Center, Palo Alto,
CA : mcvl@decsrc.ARPA or decwrl!mcvl

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