Suggested alterations: Skip the packet of chicken noodle soup mix, add a packet of Knorr’s leek soup mix instead, increase the amount of celery, and where it says “pinch,” think big. Also, we rarely eat the entire pot, but instead store the soup with no added pasta, and ladle it out as needed into a saucepan and cook the noodles directly in the soup just before serving. Sometimes it winds up a bit thicker than I like (remember, the pasta will soak up some of the broth.) If needed, I just add some low-sodium chicken broth to juice it up.
I will also on occasion make a true chicken stock, but it’s just the two of us, and we don’t eat chicken often enough that I can rely on having stock, or enough bones on hand to make some. More often than not, when we do have chicken, it’s been cooked on the smoker. Adding a handful of bones from a leftover smoky bird to this soup really improves it, but I find that making stock from smoked chicken leftovers often yields a stock that’s too intensely smoky tasting for most applications.
Like other people mentioned in the thread, I don’t use the meat I use to make chicken stock for my soup. I generally freeze the leftover bones, wingtips, and necks from chickens I roast. Once I have quite a bit (the amount varies on whether I’ve made other bone-in parts), I make stock. Chicken wings are a cheap cut to supplement leftovers with. I’ll also use carrots, celery, onions, garlic, peppercorns, and some sort of greens.
Once I have the stock, I freeze it and use it when I want to make soup. I’ll use (usually) fresh meat for the soup–sometimes I have leftovers frozen that I’ll add.
I made a goose for Thanksgiving and used stock-making as a way to clear out my fridge. I pulled off as much skin and fat as I good and discarded it (I already had some rendered from roasting that I’m saving to cock with). I removed the meat and set it aside. The bones, along with those of a chicken I had frozen, went into the stockpot, along with a lot of leftovers (vegetable stock, some roast garlic, onions, carrots, celery, a roast portabella mushroom). The stock was quite a bit darker than I was used to, but it made great soup.
Speaking of, sometimes when I’m really pressed for time and have only two to three hours to simmer, I’ll cheat a little and add some powdered bouillon or a cube* to amp up the stock/broth.
The main difference I know between stock and broth is that stock is made with a much higher proportion of bones, and is therefore more gelatinous, and therefore cooks down to a syrupy texture. However, these days, the words seem to be used pretty much interchangeably. I can’t find any authoritative cite settling on one definition. Another difference given is that stock has lower sodium content than broth. This is not something I’ve ever heard of, but there’s several folks on the internet who claim that’s the difference. Another says stock is what you make at home and broth is what you buy in a can at the store. Who knows. All I know is that store-bought broth doesn’t congeal like homemade stock, and that’s important in a number of cooking applications.
*The better way to do this, if you have anything against bouillon cubes (and I sort of do, they have a sharp flavor, but when masked by real chicken broth/stock, it’s not as offensive) is to have the forethought to make glace de viande or demi glace. Basically, both of those are heavily reduced stocks. You cook them down until they become as thick enough to coat a spoon. When settled to room temperature, they are very thick indeed, kinda like molasses or perhaps Vegemite/Marmite. It’s a lot of stock for a little glace, but it’s SUPER potent and awesome when you need to give a sauce or soup a little meaty kick. This is one instance where you need a proper stock as a normal store-bought broth does not have enough gelatin for this to properly congeal. (Although there may be some store-available stock these days that is good enough.)
Stock, made from bones, has gelatin in it, leeched from the bones and connective tissues. Broth does not. You can make aspic from stock alone, but you will need to add gelatin to a broth do so. If you reduce a stock enough, you don’t need to add any thickeners to it, either. This is one of the reasons you don’t add salt to a stock - it concentrates the salt as it reduces, causing you to have a very salty sauce at the end.
Ask the grocer if he sells chicken bones for soup. Mine makes bags full of backs, necks, wing tips, etc and sells them dirt cheap. Not that chicken is expensive, but I like the idea of not wasting stuff. I get a 5 lb bag for, I think, about $2.50.
49 cents/lb is actually not an unusual price to pay for thighs most places I’ve lived ($1/lb would be very much on the high side), and there’s a lot more meat on them and a lot less yuck (skin, gristle, etc). Considering the price difference for 4 lbs is at most $2, I’ll splurge.
From a general standpoint I think it’s helpful to treat the making of the stock and the making of the soup as two completely separate procedures.
I make my stock similar to Hello Again’s recipe, though I take a more casual approach to the proportions. The key however is to slowly simmer bony parts of chicken. I usually use wings and thighs, occasionally leftover parts from making hotwings or roast chicken, but that’s not common. Breasts are largely useless is making stock and really just ruins a decent chunk of meat.
I like Alton Brown’s method and recipe and I think it’s important to not allow the stock to reduce too much or else the bones in the pots will become beached and the collagen will not be able to dissolve out. Some people are suggesting reducing your stock and personally, I think that if you need to reduce it you did something wrong in the process of making it. Using this recipe makes a very rich, hearty stock that needs no concentration.
It’s also important to put the stock into the fridge and let the fat solidify so that you can skim it off. You will be left with a nice yellow jelly ready to be added to sauces and soups.
If you aren’t picky you can use the meat that falls from the bones in the stock, but generally I just strain out everything and pitch it and start from scratch with new veggies and meat for my soups.
The store had a 2 lb pack of breast bones on for $1 so I chucked that in a pot and just covered them with water, a couple of bay leaves and S&P. Been simmering for 5 hours and although it smells great, it tastes like nothing. Fuck!
Just my opinion, but it is not possible to make a decent chicken soup with meatless bones and no vegetables. The bare minimum is a couple of onions. Maybe if you roasted the bones first you’d get something good, but I don’t get that advanced.
I would agree. Personally, what I used to do (and not so much anymore) is always buy chicken pieces bone-in. If I needed the piece boneless for a chicken recipe, I would cut the meat off very roughly and dump the bones in a Ziplock bag in the freezer. When a couple bags got filled up, it was time to make stock. But the point is, most of the bones still had some meat hanging off of them. You at least need some necks/backs/wings in there to give it some meaty flavor. Bones by themselves don’t taste terribly good to me.
But I was thinking of bones even with some meat on them. There just isn’t much bone on a chicken breast, and what little bone there is, isn’t likely to have much marrow in it.
I’m talking about dropping a whole fryer into the pot. Chicken that’s been cut up has some exposed bone and the pieces have a larger surface area. I may just be imagining things, but to me, there is a difference.
Probably not. If you simmer the thing long enough, it’s going to fall apart. Maybe you need to simmer it longer that way, but it should come out the same. Ditto for the vegetables. I assume you cut them up so they don’t take so long to disintegrate. There really is nothing left of the veggies when you’re done other then bits and pieces here and there.
I use a whole chicken (usually) but after about 40 minutes of simmering, I remove the breast and thigh meat and set it aside. Then it is chopped up and added to the soup at the end of the cooking, some 5-6 hours later.
