Now that Autumn is here, the breeze is chilly, and the comforts of home seem all the more enjoyable, I thought I would do some posts about good old home cookin'. Although gardening, sewing, and many other domestic skills still seem to elude my grasp, cooking is one skill that I have been teaching myself for many years now. Probably, it's also the easiest. So I hope my upcoming series of posts will encourage a few people to try cooking some things from scratch that they haven't before. Food made from whole and natural ingredients at home tastes miles ahead better than anything you can buy ready made at the store. It definitely saves money making everything from scratch, which I know is an important consideration for many of us these days. And of course, when you make food yourself you know what's in it, which is no small thing either.
All right, on with it then. I have been making homemade stock for many years. Any time we have roast chicken, or chicken pieces with bones, I save the bones for stock. Homemade stock is delicious--you can use it in various cooking applications or can simply add other things to the pot and make it soup. It's less expensive than purchasing broth for cooking. It doesn't contain MSG like broth from the store. And, it has many health benefits, since minerals from the bones leach into the water. Check out this article which explains some of the health benefits of bone broth.
I used to always make stock on the stove top, but as I knew that to get really good, nutritious stock, it's best to simmer the bones for at least 12 hours, it was sometimes inconvenient to have the stock pot on the stove that long. And although I let it simmer over night a few times, I didn't really feel comfortable doing that.So when my sister gifted me with her virtually unused slow cooker recently, I decided to make chicken stock in it. I'd heard many people online say that this was their preferred way for making stock.
Last night we had two small roasted chickens for supper. After the kitchen was cleaned up, and I had put the leftover breast meat in the fridge for sandwiches, I got out the slow cooker, and placed the two chicken carcasses inside, along with the leftover gravy, the partially eaten legs, the onions that had been inside the chickens, and any little scraps and drippings from the roasting pan. I filled it up with water, set it on low, put the lid on, and forgot about it until this morning.
When I came downstairs at 8 o'clock this morning I found I had a slow cooker filled with fragrant golden stock.
I wish I could somehow put into the picture how delicious my house smelled!
I let it continue simmering through breakfast, and then turned off the slow cooker and let it cool for about an hour while we did our morning homeschool lessons. Then I scooped out the solid pieces with a slotted spoon and placed them in a bowl. I lifted the basin out of the slow cooker and carefully poured the stock through a colander lined with cheesecloth, into a large cooking pot. This step is rather important if you don't want little undesirable floaty bits in your stock. The cheesecloth isn't necessary--if you have a good strainer (not colander, an actual strainer) it should work okay. The cheesecloth just does the best job of clarifying the stock. See all the bits it filtered out?
At this point you can put the stock in the fridge, so that the fat on the surface will harden and can be easily removed. I skipped this step today because I had removed the skin from the chicken, so there wasn't too much grease (a little bit of grease doesn't bother me anyway). I wanted to use the stock right away.
There you have it, homemade stock, ready to use for anything you like.
Tomorrow I'm going to show you how to use this stock to make one of our favourite meals: Chicken pot pie. :)
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