Homemade Chicken Broth

Have you made chicken broth from scratch yet? If not, why not give it a try? It's easy and simple and so much better for you than the store stuff because you know exactly what's in it (and you control salt content)!

Basic Chicken Broth

Ingredients:
1 WHOLE rosted chicken, picked mostly clean of meat.
VEGETABLES to taste.
(I used: 5 stalks of CELERY,
1 large chopped ONION,
1 sliced green PEPPER
4 smashed cloves of GARLIC,
SALT & PEPPER.)
These are what I had on hand, you could add CARROTS, THYME, ROSEMARY, PARSELY, BAY LEAF, SAGE, and anything else you can think of. It's really hard to ruin.
WATER to cover.

Place chicken carcass into a large pot. Add vegetables. Add enough water to entirely cover the chicken. Set over burner, turn the fire to low and do not cover.

Leave it alone for at least 1 1/2 hours, but you can skim as needed.

Strain broth using a colander or mesh strainer.

Pick any remaining meat from the chicken and put into a separate container to use later.

Store in glass jars in the fridge.

Easy, right!? Absolutely simple, and it makes the house smell divine! After a night in the fridge, remove the congealed fat from the top. If you make a mistake and add too much spice, add a little more water. If you add too much water, mix in a little more spice. It'll turn out, I promise.

Now, this can be canned and stored just like the store stuff, but you need to do it with a pressure canner. A regular water-bath canner does not reach a high enough temperature to kill botulism, a rare but deadly bacterium that produces nerve toxin. I didn't actually can this batch, because I don't have a pressure canner, but I liked how it looked in the jars anyway.

I used a fair bit the day after this batch was made in a chicken topped with biscuit dish I was trying out. Yum!