Making Soup Stock in a Pressure Cooker/Canner
This recipe makes about 6 cups of delicious chicken stock. You can serve it simply as a broth, liven it up with rice or noodles, carrots, and celery, and it can be used in dozens of recipes that call for broth or stock. You can also freeze the stock in a variety of amounts for use at a later time: one-third cup, one cup, or other sizes.
Ingredients
- 2 lb chicken, primarily backs, but also including gizzards, necks, hearts & wings
- 1 medium onion, peeled and halved
- 1 celery stalk, cut in several pieces
- 1 large carrot, scraped and cut in several pieces 2 sprigs parsley
- 6 peppercorns or 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
- 1 teaspoon thyme
- 2 bay leaves
- Salt to taste
- 6 cups water
Directions:
Combine all ingredients in the pressure cooker. Lock the lid in place and bring to pressure (15 psi), then lower heat and cook 30 minutes. Allow pressure to drop, remove the lid and strain by pouring it through a strainer which has been lined with a couple of layers of damp cheesecloth, damp kitchen towel or damp paper towels. Press with the back of a wooden spoon to extract as much liquid as possible. If desired, let the stock cool, then refrigerate overnight to remove any congealed fat that has collected on the surface.
For comparison, the ingredients listed on the box of a popular commercial chicken stock are the following: “corn syrup solids, salt, hydrolyzed soy/wheat gluten protein, monosodium glutamate, dehydrated mechanically separated cooked chicken, chicken fat, dehydrated chicken broth, autolyzed yeast extract, onion powder, sugar, calcium silicate, spices & spice extract, dehydrated parsley, citric acid, hydrogenated soybean/cottonseed oil, disodium guanylate, disodium inosinate and sulphites. May contain traces of milk ingredients.”
The Nutrition Facts label lists a 4.5 g packet of this commercial chicken stock as having 530 mg of sodium, a huge amount that is not very heart friendly.