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Recipes / Basics · Chicken

Dark, Rich Chicken Stock

Start with a Costco rotisserie chicken, fill the pot, and let it barely simmer for 12 to 24 hours. Salt it at the end.

Prep
15 min
Cook
12–24 hr on the lowest simmer
Serves
1 big pot of stock
Jump to the recipe
Two Dutch ovens on a cooktop, one blue and one red, both full of dark stock with turkey bones, carrots, onion and celery

Homemade stock makes everything it goes into better, and the easy path is the best one. Grab a rotisserie chicken from Costco, throw it in the pot with vegetables and a lot of garlic, and walk away.

The secret is time. Twelve to twenty-four hours at the lowest possible simmer sounds crazy, but it’s what turns it dark and rich instead of pale and thin. The photo is the post-Thanksgiving version: one smoked turkey carcass, two pots.

Make it

Makes 1 big pot of stock

Ingredients

The bird

Vegetables

Seasoning

  1. Put the chicken in your biggest Dutch oven. Add the celery, carrots, onion, garlic, Italian seasoning, black pepper and Aleppo pepper.
  2. Fill the pot with cold water.
  3. Bring it up over medium-high heat. As soon as it starts to simmer, turn it down almost to low — you want a lazy bubble now and then, never a boil.
  4. Let it go for 12 to 24 hours, topping up with water if the level drops below the bones. The longer it goes, the darker and richer it gets.
  5. Strain out the solids, then taste and salt it only now.

Good to know

  • Salt last. Stock reduces over a long cook and gets used in recipes that add their own salt; you can always add more, but you can't take it out.
  • If it does end up too salty, dilute it with water or unsalted stock.
  • Slightly more effort: buy a whole raw chicken and break it down yourself. A how-to is coming.
  • After Thanksgiving, use the smoked turkey carcass instead. One turkey fills two big pots.
  • We use a Le Creuset Dutch oven, about 7 quarts. Any big heavy pot works.