how to make chicken stock (a video)

My goodness, everyone. Thanks for all the love about the video last week, when the Chef showed you how to break down a chicken. Your comments were lovely and made the Chef feel excited about doing one of these every week. He giggled hard when he found out that The Guardian newspaper, in the UK, named his chicken video one of the 5 most interesting links on the internet last week.

(Goodness, Great Britain. You’ve certainly been treating us well lately. Yesterday, the London Times named this little site 1 of the top 50 best food blogs in the world. Wow.)

But what meant the most to us both were the letters from those of you who braved the new and broke down a chicken this past weekend. The triumph! That’s what we want — that you will feel comfortable enough in the kitchen to attempt a task that has intimidated you in the past.

And so, today, based on your requests (and as a follow-up to last week), the Chef shows you how to make chicken stock.

A few notes:

– For the two different pots of stock, we used 10 pounds of chicken bones. In this case, they are chicken backs, but you could also use leg bones or wing bones. If you break down a few chickens, having learned the process, you can throw the carcasses in the freezer as you go. When you have two or three carcasses, make a big pot of stock.

– You’ll hear Little Bean chattering in the background in the first half of this video. Please don’t worry that she’s crying. She’s talking along with her papa. At a certain point, she grew hungry, so we stopped to feed her and put her down for the nap. That’s why you won’t hear her in the second half.

– We tried to show the entire process, but we were disrupted by guests (a welcome interruption) and the appliance repairman (our oven has stopped working, and we’re still not sure why. Yikes!). So, if you have any questions, or anything that didn’t feel clear, shoot us a question in the comments.

– By the way, we both got haircuts yesterday. Thank goodness. As you can see from the video, the situation had grown rather desperate.

Here we go.