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Updated on October 4, 2017

Next time you cook a whole chicken, don’t throw away the bones! We cook whole chickens at our house all the time. We roast them, smoke them and sometimes do a beer butt chicken on the grill. What I love about cooking a whole chicken, is that I am able to get about three meals out of them. Today I am going to share my recipe for making homemade chicken stock in the crockpot.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Crock Pot Chicken Stock

Name: Crock Pot Chicken Stock
Prep time: 25 min
Cook time: 480 min
Total time: 505 min
Ingredients: 1 large carrot ((1/2 cup)); 1 large stalk celery, chopped ((1/2 cup)); 1 cup onion, chopped; 1 tbsp olive oil; bones from whole chicken; 1 tsp Italian seasoning; salt and fresh ground pepper, to taste

Ingredients:

Carrot
Celery
Onion
Olive oil
Bones from a whole chicken
Italian seasoning
Salt and fresh ground pepper, to taste

First, you want to gather up all your ingredients to make your mirepoix. This is just a fancy word for a mix of celery, carrots, and onion. You can leave it raw, roast, or saute it with butter or olive oil. For this recipe, we are going to saute the vegetables together in some olive oil.

Get some olive oil heating in a pan or pot. Chop your veggies to a uniform consistency. For chicken stock, you just need to do a large dice. I didn’t have a large carrot or a large celery stalk, so I used two small ones of each. You want a 2 to 1 ratio of carrots and celery to the onion. Saute your veggies in the olive oil until they start to get a little tender.

While your veggies are cooking, you need to work on your chicken. Take your whole chicken and get as much meat off the bones as possible. You want to keep all the bones for this recipe. Save any chicken meat you pulled off the chicken and use to create another recipe (chicken salad, shredded chicken tacos, etc.).

Once the veggies are sauteed, place them in the bottom of your crockpot. Layer the chicken bones on top of the vegetables.

Add between 8 – 12 cups of water (depending on the size of your crockpot). Mine will hold about 10 cups.

Add 1 teaspoon Italian seasoning, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon of black pepper (add more or less, to taste).

Stir to combine and cook in your crockpot on low for 8 to 10 hours.

Once the stock is finished cooking, you will want to taste it. Season with more salt and pepper, as needed.

Strain your stock through a mesh colander into a large container. You can throw out all the bones and vegetables at this point.

Let the mixture cool and use it in any recipe that calls for chicken stock or broth.

To store this stock I have found two very space saving and helpful ways to be able to use my chicken stock:

I will freeze it in a gallon size Ziploc bag. I usually do this in 4 cup serving sizes. Lay the bag flat in your freezer to freeze, and then you can either stack them or put them upright in your freezer to store.
The other method of freezing chicken stock is to freeze the stock in ice cube trays. Once the stock is frozen, pop the cubes out and place in a Ziploc bag. Depending on your ice cube tray, each cube usually yields around 1 tablespoon of stock. This is great for when a recipe only calls for a small amount of stock to be added.