Homemade Chicken Stock is a Gateway Drug

So about a year ago, we watched a really good episode of Barefoot Contessa where a friend shows her an old family recipe for jambalaya (which is great.)  As part of this process, they recommend using homemade chicken stock.  Now, we'd been using the Kitchen Basics box chicken stock... which is great.  It keeps forever, and is ready to rock n' roll whenever you need a 1/2 cup or something in a random recipe.  But, as we love to make simple things more complicated... hey, anything to make a Saturday or Sunday completely disappear, we opted to try making a batch. 

Now, the first hurdle to this recipe is that it calls for a 20 quart stock pot.  This is a serious pot.  The man at the Le Creuset Outlet in Round Rock was dubious that anyone should ever require such a pot.  Reasonable people might have halved the recipe... but I digress. 

Old big pot... meet New Big Pot.

The next hurdle in this recipe is the amount of chicken it calls for.  15 lbs or three whole chickens... that you don't get to eat.  This bothered us so much that the first time we made this recipe we followed the advice of some internet commenter and pulled the chickens about and hour in, took the breast meat off, and returned the carcasses to the stock.  The result: a massive amount of really overcooked (and now flavorless) chicken meat.  My advice: buy the chickens (or chicken parts) on sale and write the meat off, or meticulously save leftover, raw chicken carcasses, bones and cartilage in the freezer until you have enough.  I did this.  I felt super frugal.  It requires that you make chicken a lot and that you know how to "fabricate" a chicken.

Next... well next is easy.  You barely cut the vegetables. Dont have to peel the garlic.  Throw a ton of water in and watch something on TV for 4 hours while it simmers. 

When its done... it does not look pretty.

Have a sturdy trash bag ready.  You strain once through a collander to remove bones and solid vegetable pieces.  Then, you strain again through a wire sieve to get this opaque golden goodness. 

Let cool, and then refrigerate overnight.  Then next day, there will be a solid layer of chicken fat at the top of each container.  Relatively easy to remove wholesale.  Apparently, chicken fat is a big component in jewish cooking (called schmaltz) and is essentially used in lieu of butter.   Frugal as I tried to be, there was no way I could ever use all the schmaltz this stock generated.

After that, freeze!  Be careful you haven't overfilled your containers... they will shatter, especially the cheapo Glad quart containers we bought.  I highly recommend filling a couple ice trays with stock and then transferring the cubes to a ziplock.  This way, you can quickly melt a small amount of stock when needed.

Now, to the title of the post: Homemade Chicken Stock is a Gateway drug.  Once you have all this chicken stock, you suddenly realize you never used that much in the first place.  You have to find something to do with it all!  We've ended up trying things we'd never really considered just because they called for sizeable amounts of chicken stock.  Pan-gravies, soups and more soups.  We've been able to make an asparagus soup on a mid-week lark.... a ton of soups are just simmering in stock and then pureeing.

Are these dishes made better by the homemade stock?  I really couldn't say, but it feels good to know we've made it from "scratch."  And we are forever making new things so we don't end up wasting all that damn stock!