5 Reasons to Make Your Own Homemade Chicken Stock

Home-made Thai-style lemongrass chicken soup

I never made chicken stock before this year, 2013. Now that I know how to do it, I don't think I can go back to store bought chicken stocks. 

The following is a list of reasons why I love chicken stock. I will do a follow-up post on the extremely simple recipe to making your own chicken stock.

5 Reasons I love Homemade Stock

1) The difference in taste is remarkable. Real chicken stock makes store bought stock taste basically like salty water. I swear I could just eat home made chicken stock without adding veggies, meat or anything. Try it! 

2) Tin cans are evil? The dangers of BPA in canned good are still being studied, until their is conclusive evidence I've tried to reduce my use of canned goods. In addition, the energy required to create, recycle then recreate tin is not so enviro-friendly. 

3) The Sodium Police! We do know that sodium is terrible for your cardiovascular health when eaten in large quantities. If you haven't looked at the sodium count on a canned good before, you are in for a shocker. Most canned soups contained around 50% of your daily recommended intake. 

While sodium reduced chicken stock is a wonderful answer to this problem, I feel like less salt makes the store bought stuff even less flavorful.  

When you make your own stock you can control how much salt you want to put in. I usually only put in about teaspoon, sometimes less. It still tastes absolutely wonderful! 

4) You know what goes in it. I'm extremely skeptical of the quality of meat brands used for store bought chicken stock. At least around here, we go for all natural and/or organic chicken. We use the bones, the internal organs, extra skin and meat to make the stock. I feel better just knowing what type of meat my stock is made from. 

5) Less wasteful. I don't know about you, but I have little appetite for the insides of a chicken. I have usually thrown our chicken leftovers to the neighborhood foxes and raccoons. While I'm sure the chickens and raccoons miss their snacks, I think it is better to use up all the bits of the chicken possible. Especially since chickens take a good deal of energy to breed, slaughter, pack up then ship to the store. 

When we throw out leftovers to the critters now, it is leftovers from making the broth. We've taken all of the energy we could out of that chicken. The critters still seem to gobble up all our leavings.