CHICKEN BROTH

Servings: 16
Ingredients:

1    Stewing chicken                     1    Parsley bunch
-(or 2 broilers                     1    Thyme bunch, fresh
-and a stick of butter)                  -(or a teaball with
16 C  Water                                    -about 1/2 t dried
1 lg Yellow onion                             -thyme inside)
1    Bay leaf

Take one large, heavy, lidded pan; mine is a six-quart enamelled cast-iron
Copco pan with 20 years’ good cooking already logged, and I live in terror
that yuppie burglars will break into my house some night and steal it. Put
into it one fat old chicken. If you live in a part of the world where
there are no fat old chickens for sale, put in two scrawny young chickens
and a stick of butter.

Put the pan in a cold oven, turn the temperature to 325 degrees F. and wait
patiently, doing nothing whatsoever to the chicken, for about four hours,
till it’s dark golden.

Take the pot out of the oven and let it cool to room temperature. Strip
the meat off the bones. Cover everything, meat and bones, with about a
gallon of water at room temperature. Add a raw onion, peeled and quartered,
a bay leaf, a bunch of parsley tied together with string, and a small bunch
of thyme similarly tied or a teaball with dried thyme leaves in it. Bring
the water up to a simmer and let it just simmer (make a mirror, as the
French say) for ten minutes. Turn it off and return it to room temperature
again.

Take the meat out. It is not as good as it was before the wee simmer, but
perfectly satisfactory for chicken salad or on waffles with creamed chicken
or whatever. Waste not want not.

Add another quart of water, bring the broth back up to a simmer and simmer
it for twenty minutes. Strain out the bones and vegetables. You should have
about four quarts.

NOTES:

* Rich homemade chicken broth — Surely people who make use of bouillon
cubes have no idea how easy home-made broth can be. This is not a
traditional method, but it produces good results.

* I’ve never had good luck freezing broth (it starts to taste thinnish),
so this is as much as I ever make at once. I keep it in the refrigerator in
quart Mason canning jars. I’ve read that you should simmer saved broth for
twenty minutes every four or five days, but it never lasts that long in my
house, so I can’t comment.

* I use a cup wherever a recipe calls for a cup of chicken broth. And
then, after it’s been around for a day or two, somebody suggests we really
haven’t had chicken soup with rice for a long, long time… or matzoh
dumplings… or tortellini in brodo… and then it’s all gone.

: Difficulty: easy.
: Time: about 6 hours, most of it waiting.
: Precision: no need to measure.

: Mary-Claire van Leunen
: Digital Equipment Corporation, Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA
: mcvl@decsrc.ARPA or decwrl!mcvl

: Copyright (C) 1986 USENET Community Trust

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