Chicken Broth

When we have a chicken (previously, in the US, bought cooked from Whole Foods), we like to throw the chicken, after our meal, in a pot, add some water, carrots, celery, onion, garlic, assorted spices and end up with yummy, healthy chicken broth. I thought that we'd get more flavorful chicken broth by cooking a raw chicken in the pot - figuring none of the juices would be lost in roasting the chicken first in the oven. Well, I was wrong.

Cooking the chicken in the pot takes quite a while - hours - to adequately allow the boiling/ simmering water to absorb the flavor of the chicken and other ingredients and leech the fatty goodness (the umami) out of the chicken. Since we currently do not have a large stockpot, I had been cutting out the raw chicken breasts first and saving them for another meal. However, I definitely felt that we wasted the other meat on the chicken as I didn't have patience to take time to thoroughly pick through the remains. We used to pick the carcass clean of any edible meat before moving onto the broth phase when we bought cooked chicken.

The morning after making Roast Chicken with Root Veggies, I put the chicken carcass (including the congealed fat) in the pot with water, chili peppers (should have only used 1, not 3!) and fennel stalks. Within 1 to 1 1/2 hours we had delicious, mustard colored broth with intense chicken flavor. From now on, we're cooking our chickens first, and then we'll make the broth. We'll get more meat and better broth. This time we used the broth the next day to make risotto - an unusually spicy risotto thanks to the chili peppers in the broth.