The Best Chicken Broth

I know, you think chicken broth can’t be that impressive or fancy, right? Well, guess what – you’re wrong. Broth itself provides the very foundation of many sauces and dishes and can add an amazing depth of flavor that you just can’t get otherwise.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of Knorr. I use it all the time and pretty much throw a Knorr cube into almost anything I’m making – pasta, potatoes, rice, soup, you name it. But as much as I love the convenience of a pre-fab broth, I love my own broth even more. I really do. I even went on a quest to discover the best way to make it from my Rubber Chicken and Roasted Lemon Chicken bones, and I discovered some really neat things.

What I Learned in the Making:

• There are millions of recipes for chicken broth, but you really want to create a fairly neutral broth without a ton of flavoring, so that you can do more with it. Some of the broth recipes I found had a lot of seasonings in them, and if you’re going to make an Indian dish one night and a Vietnamese dish the next, you really don’t need French seasonings in the broth. You want it to have the rich, brothy depth of flavor without the intense seasoning – save the seasoning for when you use the broth.
• Daniel over at Serious Eats wrote this fabulous article about making broth and conducted several experiments to determine how to get the very best broth. It was this article that convinced me to stop just throwing halved onions and whole carrots and celetry into my broth and to limit my broth cooking time (I used to let my broth sit cooking all day) to just 1 1/2 hours, saving me tons of time and ending with a mega-yummy broth. This is Daniel’s recipe for chicken broth. I don’t use gelatin in my broth as he mentions in the article.
• I don’t skim the broth while it’s cooking. There’s no need and there’s no benefit. I strain it when it’s done and I’m good.

I want to be clear: making broth is not for the fainthearted. Taking the meat off a chicken carcass is super gross and the way it looks when you put the bones in the pot…well, frankly, it’s almost enough to put me off meat entirely. If only it didn’t taste so darned good! 😀

This is what it looks like before you add the water. Super, super gross.

So yes, it’s kind of horrible. Look at what you dump out when the broth is done:

But this is what you get to keep:

Mmmm…tasty brothy goodness.

Even as gross as it seems in the making, the broth is amazing and the soups you can make later are incredible. Also, a little of this broth adds a ton of flavor to tomato sauce as well. NOM.