I use a lot of chicken broth/stock in my recipes. I also use a lot of chicken thighs. So I decided to use the bone and skin from the thighs that I deboned to make chicken stock. Here is a tutorial on how to debone and skin a chicken thigh. (I would have showed you myself but I didn’t want to touch my camera and take a million pictures while I had gross chicken stuff of my hands). Bone-in chicken often goes on sale and works great for the slow cooker. You can debone it yourself and save lots of money.
1. Save the skin/bones from your chicken (you can do a whole carcass or just from the thighs or whatever you have)
2. Place them in the slow cooker along with a cut up carrot, a bay leaf, a quartered onion, and a pinch of thyme and basil.
3. Fill the crock with water until it is 3/4 full.
4. Cover and cook on LOW for 10 hours or on HIGH for 5 hours.
5. Add salt to taste, if desired.
6. Let cool in the crock. Strain out the vegetables and bones and discard.
7. Refrigerate until cold, skim off the fat and then use a measuring cup to measure out one cup increments and place in freezer Ziploc bags. Freeze until you want to use.
Try a litte curry powder in it as well, it's the secret ingredient…
I love to make stock–particularly turkey stock after Thanksgiving! I usually just cook it in my big stock pot, but next time I'll give the slow cooker a try. Thanks for posting this!
I have done this for some time. A couple of additional tips – check for the cheapest chicken parts you can find – often necks and backs can be bought for very little cost. These make great broth. Wash your onion, cut off the roots, but do not peel it – leave the skin on – it adds a beautiful golden tone to your broth. I do not put in salt, as I would rather control that when I use the broth for cooking, but I do throw in some whole peppercorns and a bay leaf or two- I think these are very important to a good-tasting broth. I myself do not care for the flavor of celery – it somehow seems to overwhelm chicken broth – but I find that dding a tbl or so of dried celery leaves is quite nice.
Hope these ideas help!