Whole Braised Chicken and Stock from Frozen

 Suggestion: use the chicken in this recipe to make Chicken Salad Waffles.

🌸Macros

These are the macros for 1 part chicken stock to 1 part vegetable broth; 1 cup total. 

52 calories, 4g carbs, 3g protein, 1g fat. 

Whether this bird is frozen, or not, you can cook it the same way. If you're keto, this is better than bone broth, because it uses all of the meat, so you get more minerals and collagen. 

You don't even have to add salt, or seasonings. This stock still tastes good. 

Have you ever made homemade stock and thought it had a "weird" taste that you couldn't quite place? Me too! There are all kinds of theories for this on reddit, but I don't think any of them are right. 

The week before I went keto, I made chicken stock from a high quality bird from the health food store. I even paid $23 for that (beep). And after I tried it, it tasted so funky that I couldn't even stomach it. 

Reddit said it was due to organ blood, among other theories, and I believed them. But after I went virgin keto - I say virgin because I didn't know what the flip I was doing, and I got so low on electrolytes that I was barfing over the side of the bath tub - I got that same funky chicken stock out of the freezer (for electrolytes) and it tasted wonderful. No funk whatsoever, and I have since finished all 64 ounces of it. 

So, my theory is that I had a bunch of mitochondria that were maladapted due to a carb-heavy diet, that told my taste buds chicken stock tasted like the floor of a barn; And after they died during my keto flu, the strong mitochondria left over told my taste buds that chicken stock is amazing.  

Note: There is a vegetable broth recipe at the bottom of this post. You can use that in a 1:1 ratio to season the chicken stock. 

Makes 1 gallon. 

Ingredients:

• 1 frozen 6 pound organic local whole chicken, or a 4-5.5 pound chicky from Walmart (no bigs). 
• 64 ounces filtered water. 

Directions:

1. Place the whole frozen chicken under the tap for a minute, or two, to loosen up the plastic wrap. 
2. Cut the bag away, and rinse bird again under the tap. 
3. Transfer bird to a 6 quart cast iron ceramic Dutch oven, and top with 64 ounces of filtered water. 
4. Bring Dutch oven up to a boil on medium high heat by cooking for 30 minutes on the stove.
5. Then place the lid over the Dutch oven and bake it at 325 degrees Fahrenheit for 4 hours (frozen bird), or 3.5 hours (thawed bird).
6. Remove from oven, and use tongs to fish the bird out of the liquid. 
7. Then carefully separate the chicken meat from the bones, fat, skin, veins and cartilage. It's mostly easy to do, because it's so tender that the meat wants to fall away from all of it's other parts. 
8. Then place a fine mesh sieve over a large bowl with a pour spout, and strain chicken broth through the sieve. 
9. Use the pour spout to pour chicken stock into a large ice cube container and put that into the freezer until frozen. 
10. Transfer chicken stock ice cubes to a gallon-sized freezer bag. These will keep for 6 months. The chicken can be portioned and frozen too, but since we meal-plan, we finish it during the week. 
11. If you want seasoned chicken stock, mix this with 1 part vegetable broth before you transfer it to the freezer. Recipe below. 

Serves 12.  

[Edit:] I did just make 2 more birds from Walmart, instead of the health food store, and they do taste kinda funky to me (the stock). Correction: the first Walmart bird tastes funky. That’s the one I cooked for 4 hours from thawed instead of 3.5, and the one I cooked with white wine and ACV to leach out more minerals. Don’t do that. The meat on that one was also kind of dry. I’m going to marinade it with Barbacoa sauce to see if this is a good way to use up this meat. 

But anyway, 

I seasoned the stock this time... 

by cooking both birds, one at a time, using the regular recipe; but then I used a second large pot, with 64 oz of water to make vegetable stock to mix with it. 

The vegetables I used to make the stock were: 1 pound baby cut carrots, 2 stalks of celery, 1 large yellow onion, 5 jalapeños (because I needed to use them up), 3 inch piece of ginger, 1 lemon (with the rind cut off, halved), 1 bunch parsley, 2 tbsp apple cider vinegar, 1/4 cup white cooking wine, 1 tsp salt, 5 cloves of garlic, and 1 tsp black pepper. 

I brought that to a boil, then I reduced the heat to medium-medium-low (like setting #2 out of 10), covered it, and cooked it for 4 hours. It turned out amazing. Discard the veggies.