A lot of people make turkey broth after Thanksgiving...
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I post a picture and just a few words.
...but most people probably don't wait until quite this long after Thanksgiving.
The good news is, I think I have now used all the poultry bones that were hanging out in my freezer.
And fortunately, I have a manual-defrost chest freezer, so even turkey bones from last Thanksgiving are still in pretty decent by August. 😉
We eat a lot of chicken in the summer (grilled by us) or even the rotisserie kind from the grocery store so we don't have to heat up the house, so by summer's end I have lots of chicken carcasses in the freezer and I always make a ton of stock. I'm thankful (wink-wink) to be able to use my (basically) free stock when making my Thanksgiving dinner (7 cups in just my dressing alone)!
And then...making the stock from the turkey carcasses!! The best stock, hands down. I always get a little tear in my eye when I use the last of it (months later), lol.
Are you kidding me? I still have a whole turkey in my freezer! I generally buy extras at Thanksgiving and Christmas. My family likes a "Thanksgiving Dinner" more than once a year. Fortunately, I have a manual defrost freezer, too. This bird probably won't see the light of day until early October.
Or maybe you could just cook it on Thanksgiving? 😉
Ditto here, except ours is a turkey breast with wings. :-/
Oh yes, don't we LOVE our freezers!? 🙂
Can you please list the steps to complete this task? I look forward to reading your posts. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. God bless!
Basically this but with turkey bones instead of chicken bones.
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/chicken-stock-recipe.html
I leave out the onion (because I'm allergic and also because onions are gross) and don't always use the same herbs and what not. I'll use celery tops sometimes.
Yeah, that's pretty similar to the way I do it. But I do always include onion because ONIONS ROCK.
(unless you're allergic to them like Battra.)
We have the opposite problem: lots of chicken stock but nothing to use it on. I'm not a sauce person at all (if you have to put a sauce on your meat, it generally means you don't like the taste of meat) so it's basically base for chicken soup for us, but that's not something you make much of in the summer.
I drink chicken stock in place of tea--hot or cold. There's such good nutrition in chicken stock, and most importantly lots of gelatin/collagen which is great for skin and bones. I have damage to my collagen from a childhood spent outdoors in the tropical sun, so this is doubly important for me.
For cold broth, make sure there's enough salt and add a squirt or two of lemon juice--it's really refreshing. For hot, I just heat it in a mug and sip it like tea.
I also freeze some broth in ice cube trays. When I reheat something like rice, potatoes, etc, I add a cube of broth for added flavor and moisture. And it's a great liquid to steam or boil veggies in--increases the nutrient density and enhances the flavor (try kale and swiss chard).
I make my broth in an pressure cooker (mine is an electric, multi-function pressure cooker which I love like one of my kids!). It takes about 1 hour start to finish for lovely, clear, gelled broth. In this pressure cooker, I literally load in the ingredients, push a button, and come back an hour or more later to beautiful broth. It doesn't heat the house or smell it up, either.
I make broth almost weekly. I buy packages of wings when they are on sale to toss in if I don't have enough bones. The wings are full of cartilage to ensure that the broth really gels.
There's poultry parts & celery stalk bits in my freezer waiting to be made into stock. We're huge carnivores in this house but do enjoy an occasional sauce with the protein depending on the meal. 🙂
How do you store your stock?
I usually freeze mine in Mason jars. This works just fine as long as you leave headroom for the stock to expand as it freezes. Otherwise the jar will crack during the freezing process.
I'm going to jump in with a couple of tips:
- A pound of bird bones makes about a pint of stock. (NB: beef and pork stock require a different ratio.)
- Never add salt to stock. Stock gets used to many things so it's easy for properly-salted broth to turn into a hideously over-salted sauce. Wait for the final product to add salt. That said, when I'm tasting to determine if a stock is tasty enough, I'll drop a few grains of salt into the tasting spoon.
- Once the stock is cooked, simmer it down to concentrate it. I simmer mine down to 1/4 of the original. It takes up *much* less space that way. (FG, do you concentrate your stock?)
- I store mine in plastic Tell Fresh containers (like tupperware, but rectangular, which is a more efficient use of space). I fill mine to 1/2" from the top, let them cool in the fridge, then freeze. This keeps the top of the stock level and thus it doesn't pop off the lid in the freezer.
And how do you make your turkey broth?
We definitely didn't wait that long last year to make the stock...but then again we had 3 carcasses to play with! Homemade stock is the best. Chest freezer was the best purchase of last year, was able to buy the turkeys at great prices and didn't worry about finding a place to keep 'em frozen.
Can you freeze mason jars?
Yep, as long as you leave enough headspace for the liquid to expand as it freezes.
urkey broth from the carcass is the BEST tating 'chicken soup' I have ever made.
I had pork bones in my chest freezer for *years* before I finally made it into stock. I think the butcher gave me several pigs' worth of bones in my last order because I had 25 lbs waiting for me.
Good thing I concentrate my stock because I had 3 quarts of stock even at 75% concentration.