My favorite brand of canned/boxed chicken stock was More Than Gourmet. Unfortunately, I can’t get it any more. Ajinomoto bought the company and is no longer making those lines of retail products.
Now I’m looking for another brand that I like. The New York Times did a taste test, and their favorite was Good & Gather, the Target house brand. I suppose I could try that, but I there are so many other brands that they didn’t try in their test.
Please share your opinions on the best chicken stocks. And if you also want to chime in about beef, vegetable, or other types of stocks, that would be nice, too.
See the following link for America’s Test Kitchen reviews of various chicken stocks and other information. I don’t think this is behind a paywall, but could be wrong.
Me too. Their vegetable stock is excellent also. It has replaced the use of small amounts of tomato paste in recipes for me, and I use it in plenty of other dishes. There’s a low sodium version too.
I know I’m not answering the question, but my freezer is usually full of frozen quarts of stock. Any time I buy chicken I buy a whole one. When it’s eaten, I toss the bones and skin into a stockpot, add carrots and celery, onions and garlic (leave the skin on the onion for the color), probably handfuls of herbs, a lot of water, and simmer for some hours. Drain it and you’ve got by FAR the best chicken stock. Nothing whatsoever you can buy can touch it for flavor. And the effort involved is minimal.
I’m a minimal effort cook generally, and this is minimal effort for huge payoff.
I do the same! It helps if you have a large freezer. Any time I’ve got a chicken carcass I bag it and freeze it until I’ve got some nice leisurely weekend-time to make some stock. You can also simmer the carcass from frozen so it doesn’t even need the headspace to remember to defrost it in advance. I toss in any old veg I have hanging around which would otherwise be headed for the composter.
Tastes great but also make me feel saintly and wholesome.
I’ve been buying and enjoying Pacific Foods Unsalted Bone Broth lately. Pro: I’ve taste-tested several commercial broths / stocks alone, and this seems to be the tastiest, most well-rounded one to me (after adding salt to it-- I only buy it unsalted so it has more versatility in recipes). Con: It’s kind of expensive. Also, calling it ‘bone broth’ is a stretch, since when I refrigerate leftovers it stays completely liquid, so it clearly has very little dissolved ‘college inn’.
By far the best stock / bone broth, however, is the stuff you make yourself, and it’s pretty darn easy. I throw a Costco rotisserie chicken carcass or two and a few raw chicken wings into an Instant Pot along with onion, garlic, celery, peppercorns, thyme, bay leaf, and a teaspoon of vinegar. Fill to the top with water, cook for an hour, strain, and you have the best damn bone broth that turns to jelly overnight in the fridge you ever had. I store and freeze it in quart-size freezer bags.
I swear by Better than Bouillon mostly because any half opened box of liquid stock in my fridge has a 50/50 chance of going bad and I always either had to do the “take a tiny sip of cold chicken stock to see if tastes weird” or “dump a cup of stock into my dish and throw it out because I forgot it went bad”.
I freeze my home-made stocks after being reduced down into ice cube trays but there’s no way I’m devoting precious freezer space to boxed stock. Hence, why the switch to BtB was a huge quality of life upgrade for me.
