Cooking 101: chicken broth in one hour, three ingredients

With just three ingredients, homemade chicken broth is only an hour away. And with this simple technique, you've got the perfect base for hundreds of homemade recipes, using healthy chicken broth you made yourself.

Ingredients:
Water
6-8 Organic chicken thighs with skin, or 1 whole chicken with skin, thawed, stray feathers removed
1 tablespoon Kosher Salt

Directions:
Place the chicken in a large stock pot. Fill 3/4 with water (tap, filtered or bottled). Add salt to the water. Place over high heat with the lid on, and cook until the pot comes to a rolling boil. Reduce heat to a strong simmer (barely a boil), with the lid slightly ajar. Continue to simmer for one hour.

After one hour, turn off the heat, remove the chicken from the pot and set aside.

Strain the liquid using cheese cloth, a mesh strainer or chinois strainer into a shallow glass container to cool. The chicken broth temperature should be reduced to 70 degrees within 2 hours, and then to 41 degrees within 4 additional hours to prevent the growth of bacteria. Broth can be stored for one week in the fridge, and used in place of store-bought broth in your favorite recipes. Or, freeze the broth for up to one month.

Remove the chicken meat from the bone and store covered in the fridge for soup, chicken salad, or tacos.

Now what do I do with it?
Create a different variation of this stock every week by adding different ingredients. Vegetables and aromatics such as onion, carrot, celery and thyme will add a fresh and slightly more complex flavor to your broth. Or, try sautéing the chicken, skin side down, before adding water to the pot for even more flavor. You can also sauté all ingredients - onions, carrot, celery, and chicken before adding the water, which is very close to the technique of making chicken stock vs. chicken broth.

Hey, wait! What's the difference between chicken broth and chicken stock?
Both broth and stock involve boiling chicken in water with seasoning. But time and technique make the difference. An excellent broth can be achieved in one hour by simply boiling all ingredients, extracting the essence of those ingredients in a short amount of time. A flavorful stock, however, takes many hours and begins with oven roasting the meat and vegetables.

Chicken stock offers a rich, full-bodied flavor from pre-roasting the meat and bones with vegetables and seasonings. The roasting pan is usually deglazed with wine or beer, and then all ingredients are added to the stock pot with water to develop additional flavor and continue the breakdown of collagen - the substance in connective tissue that, when liquified by heat, gives stock that thick, velvety mouth feel, similar to butter.

Chicken broth is typically a light, golden yellow or tan color, lighter in texture and taste. Chicken stock is on the robust, deeper end of the spectrum from the additional roasted ingredients, is viscous, and more substantial.

What happens if I cook my broth longer than an hour?
A deeper chicken flavor will develop from a longer simmer, as well the viscosity, as the collagen will continue to melt and dissolve into the pot of liquid. You won't achieve the light mahogany color of a chicken stock, but you will have more of a concentrated chicken flavor.