Recipe: Fond brun de poulet – brown chicken stock

Ingredients

1 or more chicken carcasses with its giblets, if you have them (keep the liver apart – that’s some good eating right there)

Per chicken carcass you will need:

100g carrots, roughly chopped

100g onion, roughly chopped

200g tomatoes OR 20g concentrated tomato paste

Bouquet garni (herb stalks, bay leaf, leek leaf wrapped together)

1.5 litres water

Method

‘Brown’ because you roast the carcass(es) first. If you don’t roast the carcasses it becomes white chicken stock. That simple.

So, break up the carcass(es) and colour them in an oven at 180C, while preparing your GA – Garniture Aromatique. This means just chop up the vegetables, then add them for the last five minutes of your 25 minute roasting of the bones.

Put the whole lot, plus the giblets, into a suitable saucepan, cover with water, bring to a boil and allow to simmer very gently for one and a half to two hours. I quite often drain off the cooking liquid after an hour and re-cover with more water, then mix together the two lots at the end and boil it to reduce by half. It seems to give a more concentrated taste than just using one lot of water.

And then that’s it, you now have a couple of litres of chicken stock. Usually I freeze it in half-litre portions and put some into ice cube trays. These I later decant into plastic bags so I can just add a little stock to a soup or sauce as necessary without defrosting a whole half litre. It really does add Scrummy and Yummy to your recipes and is well worth the effort.