Easy Homemade Chicken Broth
Tuesday I shared one of the easiest and BEST Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup recipes around. In my opinion, the key to making it the best soup around starts with the broth. I know the idea of making your own homemade chicken broth might be scary, but trust me, it’s not!
The best part, you can make a big batch now, use the leftover chicken meat in the soup recipe, and then freeze the rest for later. I even saw this great idea on The Kitchn for using ice cube trays to freeze individuals portions.
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Ok, back to the broth!
Easy Homemade Chicken Broth
- 3-4 pound chicken (organic preferred)
- 3-4 carrots, peeled and cut in half
- 2 turnips, quartered
- 2 celery stalks, cut in half
- 2 onions, quartered
- 1 head of garlic, halved
- 1 tsp. pepper corns (or cracked black pepper)
- 2 bay leaves
- 2-3 sprigs of fresh thyme
- Place the chicken in a large pot, remove giblets.
- Put the rest of the stock ingredients in the pot along with the chicken.
- Put enough water in the pot to cover the chicken- approx. 12 cups. Cover, bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 1-1 ½ hours or longer, until chicken is cooked.
- Remove chicken from stock and let cool.
- Finely strain the vegetables and herbs out of your stock. Discard skin and bones and hand shred chicken meat from chicken and set aside. Use stock immediately for The Best Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup, or refrigerate up to one week or freeze for up to 3 months.
Here are some more soup recipes we love!
- Sausage Tortellini Soup
- Instant Pot Creamy Chicken Wild Rice Soup
- The Best Crockpot Minestrone Soup
- The Best Crockpot Chicken Noodle Soup
- Crockpot Lasagna Soup
Easy Homemade Chicken Broth
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Ingredients
- 3-4 pound chicken organic preferred
- 3-4 carrots peeled and cut in half
- 2 turnips quartered
- 2 celery stalks cut in half
- 2 onions quartered
- 1 head of garlic halved
- 1 tsp. pepper corns or cracked black pepper
- 2 bay leaves
- 2-3 sprigs of fresh thyme
Instructions
- Place the chicken in a large pot, remove giblets.
- Put the rest of the stock ingredients in the pot along with the chicken.
- Put enough water in the pot to cover the chicken- approx. 12 cups. Cover, bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 1-1 ½ hours or longer, until chicken is cooked.
- Remove chicken from stock and let cool.
- Finely strain the vegetables and herbs out of your stock. Discard skin and bones and hand shred chicken meat from chicken and set aside. Use stock immediately, refrigerate up to one week or freeze for up to 3 months.
Nutrition
Nutritional Disclaimer: Family Fresh Meals is not a dietician or nutritionist, and any nutritional information shared is only an estimate. We recommend running the ingredients through an online nutritional calculator if you need to verify any information.
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Post updated September 2020
5 STARS! – Soup is soup, right? Nope, not by a long shot. You need the right balance of ingredients for Your particular taste. If you start with quality ingredients, you’ll get a quality product; which in this case is soup. There are as many recopies as there are loving Grandmothers out there and each soup is Loved and said to be the best by those they made it for. This one, to Me at least, tastes as close to my Grandma’s as I’ve made in a long time. There are some here that say it’s too bland or the chicken tough; well it’s up to You to tweak it to Your taste and know when to turn off the crock pot. If you don’t like the taste of bay, don’t put it in or replace it with, say Rosemary, if you prefer; which was the missing ingredient in this one from my Grandma’s I just found out. I accidentally grabbed the wrong spice jar for pinch of thyme and, Voila, I have Gram’s soup back. Now I used Swanson’s Low Sodium Homestyle Broth since I didn’t make it from scratch and that is a perfect substitution for homemade. Also, the chicken breasts I got were butcher trimmed from Jewel. Just 2 big and meaty breasts were all it took to make it perfect, heheh oops Sorry, and they just fell apart as I was trying to take them out so I just broke them up in the pot with salad tongs; hey it works so why not. You need to know your crock pot’s time for each setting. Mine on Low takes a little longer; it just gets to 165 degrees and stay there, so I knew to let it cook another hour before adding the NoYolk Noodles; which are my Favorite too. Here’s a tip for your kids that are heading off to college if their not too good at figuring out portions and their cutting skills border on manicures: Jewel has chopped onions, celery, carrots and other veggies cut and pkgd daily in their cooler. For a 6 qt crock you’ll need 1 small container of onion and 1 med container of carrots and celery (those are both in 1 container) so it will be easier for them and there won’t be any small leftover portions. The bonus for the Jewel veggies is that the celery they use is the hearts, so you won’t need to peel them. I guess that’s what it’s called. My Grandma used to let me peel the bis off so you didn’t get the stringy fibers caught in your teeth. Also, it was the Only way I could snack on the veggies without getting a whack to my behind…1 piece for the soup and i piece for me, 2 pieces for the soup and 1 piece for me. I think she didn’t mind. I guess it was because my mouth was full and I was quiet. Keep Crockin’ on!
Oops, that was for the soup and not the broth. I remember a little here and there when she started making the broth. She used “the bits” as she called them: necks, the little cheesecloth pkgs that used to be inside the whole chicken (my Gramps and I would walk up to the local butcher shop when the weather was nice with her list of “bits”), but she didn’t use the whole chicken for the stock, the skins and another cheesecloth thingy of more chicken bones and huge chunks of different veggies. The spices and time it took, I have no clue on, although she did have a second stove in the basement that she used for her boiled cabbage and that was on for hours so she might have also made the stock along side that to save time maybe. You could smell it outside from a couple of houses away. Does anybody know how I can be that kid again; I miss those days and Both of them.
I save my chicken carcasses from my meals and freeze them, then when I am planning on making broth, take them out thaw them, and put them in a pot with onion, carrots, celery and spices and bring everything to a boil, then simmer for a couple of hours, strain everything, put the vegies in the compost with the bones from the carcass and cool the stock, put it in the fridge overnight, next day skim fat off the top of the stock, and it is ready to use, or freeze for later use.
Delish broth recipe. The only one I use from now on thank you:)
Turnips/swedes are not often at a good price….do you need to use these?
So you can obviously eat the chicken because it will be cooked in the process, correct?
Yep! Its a two for one. I usually use the broth and the chicken in my chicken noodle soup 🙂
This is my absolute go to recipe for homemade chicken soup!