Fall means soup & it's time to make stock/broth

Homemade soups are fast, easy, inexpensive, and healthier than canned or boxed soups. Making soups with homemade stock/broth (I use the terms interchangeably), further reduces the cost and allows more control over the flavor and salt content of your soup.

In this post, I'll describe making chicken stock in the oven, my favorite lazy method. I'm telling you how to make easy, tasty, cheap stock -- not a beautiful clear broth to be served as consomme or boiled down into a demi-glace. I'm all about easy cooking.

If you plan ahead, it's easy to accumulate the makings for the stock. Just save the bones and scraps from chicken. These scraps can be either raw or cooked. Just keep a storage bag in the freezer and add scraps as you have them. Some folks even include carrot ends, the outer layer and skin of onions, parsley stems, and other vegetable leavings in their bag of frozen scraps.

When you have a gallon bag full of scraps, put the frozen lump in a big, oven-proof stew pot, preferably one with a cover. If you don't have a cover you can use foil.

Now add things for flavor.

First among the flavor ingredients are vegetables, the most traditional being celery, carrots, and onions. Unpeeled carrots, onions with the peels left on, and the leafy parts of celery are most flavorful. Another popular thing it add is parsley. You can just use parsley stems if you wish. How many (if any) vegetables you add are up to you. The vegetables may be raw or cooked. Roasting the vegetables and the bones before you make stock results in more depth of flavor.

Second among the flavor ingredients are spices and dried herbs. You may or may not add any of these. My choices are usually a tablespoon or so of peppercorns and several bay leaves, crushed in my hand. Buying bay leaves in 2-ounce bags or jars is a lot cheaper than buying them in the little jars at the grocery. If you want bay flavor, buy more bay leaves.

Now, pour in enough tap water or filtered tap water to cover the chicken scraps and vegetables up to within about an inch of the rim of the pot (at most). More stuff/less water = stronger broth more quickly. Less stuff/more water = weaker broth more slowly.

Cover and place in the oven. Any oven temperature over the boiling point of water works. Best is between 225F and 275F. Two hot an oven can cause the stock to boil away before much flavor has developed.

Now ignore the pan of stock for several hours -- 3 at the very minimum though 6 is probably better. You want it to simmer until all possible flavor has been wrung out of your ingredients. You want it to taste more of chicken than of tap water. If it is refusing to develop flavor, you can remove the lid and let it reduce for an hour or so.

Do not expect homemade stock to taste like boxed or canned stock, which tends to be heavily salted and tastes like the ocean. When you use your homemade stock to make your homemade soup, you can add any salt you need.

When the stock has cooled enough to handle, strain through a screen sieve to remove solids. If you don't have a screen sieve, a clean cloth will do. Discard the solids. They have given their all to the stock.

Optionally, to defat the stock, allow it to sit in the refrigerator overnight. The fat will coagulate on top and can be removed and saved or discarded. (A naughty little secret is that this saved chicken fat makes fantastic pie crust for chicken pot pie!)

Spoon the cooled stock into meal- or recipe-sized containers and freeze. It will keep in the freezer for several months to be whipped out and thawed any time you wish to make a pot of soup.