I love roasting chicken, not only for the wonderful meal, but for the joy of having the carcass left over to make a great chicken stock.
Ingredients:
chicken carcass
Onion
herbs
black peppercorns
carrots
red peppers
garlic
water
A great way to start this dish is with a lovely roast chicken dinner. Feast and laugh and enjoy every bite. What you're likely to leave is a carcass with some meat on it. If the meat is worth picking off the bones, then do so. Dice it up and set it aside.
Put the chicken carcass into a large, heavy bottomed pan. The pan needs to be large enough for you to add fluid and completely cover the bones. If you don't have a large enough pan, then break up the carcass!
Add a whole onion, a couple of carrots (chopped up), any herbs that you have around, and a red pepper. (In preparation, wash or peel the carrots, and remove stalk and seeds from the red pepper and roughly dice the flesh.
Cover with water. Throw in a handful of peppercorns. Bring to the boil. Stir well, and break up the carcass if that happens, but you don't need to work hard at it. Later in the process it'll happen naturally.
Lower the heat and either put a lid on, or else put a thick layer of baking parchment over the top and weigh it down - I often use half an onion to weigh the paper down. Simmer gently for many hours. The longer and slower, the better. Every few hours, remove the lid and stir it all up. Avoid letting it evaporate much.
Eventually, (maybe 12 hours?) you'll begin to feel that there's no more flavor to get out of the ingredients. Leave it, lidded, to completely cool down. Once the heat is out, refrigerate, still intact with all the ingredients.
After several more hours, strain the liquid. It should be jellied. Transfer the strained liquid into Kilner jars and keep refrigerated until you need the stock. Don't salt the stock - just season whatever dish you're adding the stock to.
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