Name: Chicken Stock
Ingredients: gizzard; chicken; cooked chicken carcasses; celery; boiling fowl; parsley stalks; carrot; thyme; peppercorns; cold water; onion; leek

Darina Allen

Chicken Stock

Preparation info

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Darina Allen's Simply Delicious Suppers

By Darina Allen

Published 2001

About

Home-made chicken stock is a wonderfully useful thing to have in your fridge or freezer. Fond is the name for stock in French; fond means foundation, which just sums up stock: stocks are the foundation of so many things – soups, sauces, casseroles, etc. Making stock is really just an attitude of mind! Instead of absent-mindedly flinging things into the bin, keep your carcasses, giblets and vegetable trimmings and use them for your stock pot.

Ingredients

2–3 raw or cooked chicken carcasses or a mixture of both or 1 × 1.8 kg boiling fowl, disjointed giblets from the chicken, i.e. neck, heart, gizzard
1 sliced onion
1 leek, split in two
1 stick of celery or 1 lovage leaf
1 sliced carrot
few parsley stalks
sprig of thyme
6 peppercorns
3.4 litres cold water

Method

Break up the carcasses as much as possible. Put all the ingredients in a saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to the boil and skim the fat off the top with a tablespoon. Simmer for 3–5 hours. Strain and remove any remaining fat. If you need a stronger flavour, boil down the liquid in an open pan to reduce by one-third or one-half the volume. Do not add salt.

Note

Stock will keep several days in the refrigerator. If you want to keep it for longer, boil it up again for 5–6 minutes every couple of days; allow it to get cold and refrigerate again. Stock also freezes perfectly. For cheap containers use large yoghurt cartons or plastic milk bottles, then you can cut them off the frozen stock without a conscience if you need to defrost it in a hurry!

In restaurants the stock is usually allowed to simmer uncovered so it will be as clear as possible but I usually advise people making stock at home to cover the pot, otherwise the whole house will smell of stock and that may put you off making it on a regular basis.

The above recipe is just a guideline. If you have just one carcass and can’t be bothered to make a small quantity of stock, why not freeze the carcass and save it up until you have 6 or 7 carcasses plus giblets, then you can make a really good-sized pot of stock and get best value for your fuel.

Chicken liver shouldn’t go into the stock pot because it will cause bitterness in the stock, but the livers make a wonderful smooth pâté which can be served in lots of different ways.

There are some vegetables which should not be put in the stock: potatoes because they soak up flavour and make the stock cloudy; parsnips – they are too strong; beetroot – they are too strong and the dye would produce a red stock. Cabbage or other brassicas give an off-taste on long cooking. A little white turnip is sometimes an asset, but it is very easy to overdo it. I also ban bay leaf in my chicken stocks because I find that the flavour of bay can predominate easily and add a sameness to soups made from the stock later on.

Salt is another ingredient that you will find in most stock recipes, but not in mine. The reason I don’t put it in is because if I want to reduce the stock later to make a sauce, it very soon becomes oversalted.

Preparation info

Difficulty

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Ingredients

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