How to make clear chicken stock for loads of easy dinners
Thanks to my husband Darren we always seem to have a ready supply of delicious frozen portions of (organic) chicken stock.
I then use it for as the base for really tasty risottos and soups, he uses it for lovely clear noodle dishes with veg and tofu (made from his Wagamama cookbook), and my mum loves it just hot on its own.
Darren (gawd bless him) loves to cook a roast chicken dinner on a Sunday afternoon. He gets an organic bird mainly because I insist that I can’t stomach the thought of an abused battery hen.
As he is preparing the meat and vegetables for the dinner we are about to eat he also starts feeding the stock pot in preparation for receiving the chicken carcass when we have eaten.
He puts in
- the ends of all the vegetables he uses in the roasting pot (leeks, parsnips, carrots and celery)
- those he uses to make stuffing (onion and sage),
- he adds to this any other veg we have hanging around and about to go ‘over’ (but not potatoes as this makes the stock all startchy and not peppers as I mentioned it gave the stock too strong a flavour).
- He chucks in a tomato,
- a bouquet garni, some bay and peppercorns,
- the bones of the bird and covers it all with water
The pot is then gently simmered for ages (2 or 3 hours) – usually until we go to bed.
The lid is kept on at the end to keep it relatively sterile and then the next morning I ladle the beautiful glisteny broth through a sieve into a large jug and then pour it into portion sized containers, label it with the date (Top Tip: have a roll of masking tape and a pen in the kitchen drawer for labelling) and shove it in the freezer.
March 24th, 2007 at 12:48 am
[...] of fairly nice white wine and let simmer. As the juices get soaked up add a large ladle of veg or chicken stock and keep repeating until the rice is cooked (about 20 mins). I chucked in a small handful of frozen [...]