Chicken Stock

Well, it's time to make some chicken stock.

First, the veggies.


I give them a rough chop, and then brown them in a pan with no oil, and no salt.


Dump into your crock pot with these aromatics.


If you're like me, you've been keeping chicken carcasses in the freezer. Toss them in the stock pot, and add water to cover.


Turn on the stock pot, and walk away. Go to sleep, go to work, whatever you want. Check up on it every once in a while, and add water if the level goes down. You're not looking to boil the liquid down, you're looking to extract the collagen from the bones.


You know it's ready when a chicken bone crumbles in your hand like this.


Time to separate the liquid from the solids. Using tongs, dump the bones and stuff into a colander over a pan to catch the runoff (shown: a pasta pot with removable colander).


Pour the liquid into a separate pot through a sieve. Place the put in a pan full of icewater to cool. If you feel like ruining a couple of plastic bottles, you can use the Alton Brown trick of freezing half-full (clean) plastic bottles of water and putting them straight into the pot. Clever, if not a bit messy.


Ladle some of the stock into a fat separator, and fill individual cup and half-cup Tupperware, and freeze.