I am a tad embarrassed to admit that I’ve never made any of my own broths. Is that bad? Pathetic? Up to this point it just wasn’t on my radar as something I could or should do myself. I’m not sure what I thought it involved and figured it was likely difficult and time consuming. And we are lucky enough to live during a time when so many foods are just as convenient to buy at the store and often it’s faster and sometimes cheaper than making it myself.

Recently though I was reading the label on a box of organic chicken stock I bought at the store (don’t recall why, but it was an exciting read) and was like, “Wait a minute. Chicken, water, carrot, celery, onion, salt, pepper, and bay leaves. This is all stuff I have!” Challenge accepted!

As I referenced, 2021 is going to be a year of MIM (make it myself). My hope is to identify a handful of items I use regularly and learn how to make them. Chicken broth seemed like the perfect first foray. I searched for a few different recipes and used a bit of a combination approach.

Here’s what I did:

I saved vegetable scraps and chicken bones for about two weeks in a gallon ziplock bag in the freezer. Whenever I was chopping carrots, onions or celery for another meal, I saved the (washed) ends, nubs and skin. Ordinarily I would have tossed them in the compost so this wasn’t any extra work or cost. Once I had the whole bag filled, I figured I had enough.

I put the chicken bones (and a few feet) in my crock pot and added 2 T of apple cider vinegar.

Then I added the vegetables – celery, carrots, onion.

I covered everything with 16 cups of water, basically filling my crock pot to the brim. I added 2 teaspoons of salt and ¼ tsp of pepper.

Set the crockpot to low for about 16 hours. I turned it on around 9pm and went to bed (with mild nightmares of a This is Us situation happening) and then turned it off around 12pm the next day.

Strained out the veggie and chicken remnants, and filled my mason jars.

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SPOILER: I didn’t love the flavor of this first attempt. I was kind of bummed and I think this is how people get discouraged doing things themselves and just opt to buy them. It’s disappointing to do extra work and not be happy with the result but I am going to give this a few more tries because a) it was very little effort and b) there are many ways of tweaking the flavor. I am going to pay attention to the ratio of vegetables because I think I had too much onion and not enough carrot. I can also try using bone-in chicken thighs and wings. And add different spices like garlic, thyme, rosemary, or parsley. I also want to try plain vegetable broth.

One of my underlying goals was to put food scraps to use and I did that. The flavor was fine, just not amazing. I used it to make butternut squash soup, copy cat Olive Garden Zuppa Toscana, and a few other things, all of which came out very tasty.

Let me know what things you’ve made yourself that you were intimidated to try but now can’t imagine buying at the store.