A Dull and Boring Story About the Road to Broth

What to do with Chicken Backs

North Pasture Farms has been carrying Pastured Chicken as well as GrassFed Beef and Pork raised ethically on our website store for about 12 years. It has been a good ride so far. More and more people want to eat healthy so our GrassFed, Pastured and Ethically Raised meats are becoming more and more popular.

Boneless chicken breasts go like hotcakes. Thighs also go fairly quickly. Legs and wings sell OK as long as the price is low enough for people with families and it is good to put them on sale frequently and have multiple package bundles to feed a bunch of people at not too high a price.

The lowly chicken back is a different store. The chicken back goes nowhere by itself. It doesn’t go nowhere FAST, it just sits there and goes nowhere. Some people buy chicken backs to make soup which is an excellent idea but the idea doesn’t seem to catch on broadly.

I checked with the chicken processor to find out what most producers do with their backs. She said that they throw them away.

Throw them away!?!! What a waste!

Yep. Throw them away. It costs money to package and store them. Most guys just take their lumps and throw them away.

Well, I am going to keep them and figure out something that they can be used for.

I have never been terribly risk averse. I paid the bit extra for bags to put them in and paid for them to take up space in my freezer. At one point I had more than a year worth of chicken backs.

I thought I was going to find some place that would make broth and I could sell the broth. At least recoup some of my costs.

I looked high and low for someone with a commercial kitchen who would spend some time making broth.

I had visions of a kettle like there was in the kitchen where I worked for a while. It had two huge kettles that were heated with high pressure steam. Each would hold about 55 gallons of whatever the cook was making. Once the steam started howling through them they would make steam bubbles form on the bottom in about 3 minutes. The water would be a rolling boil in about 10 minutes.

I was the peon, the new guy, the big strong guy who carried stuff there. I was put to work chopping carrots, celery, peeling potatoes and chopping them up. Someone would go in the freezer and come out with boxes of veggies like corn, peas, and green beans. The main cook would throw about 100 lbs of stew meat in the pot and then maybe a pound of salt and a pound of pepper. When the meat was mostly done, the potatoes and other vegetables would go in and the thing would cook for a while. That stew was the best ever. All the vegetables were fresh and the cook most definitely knew what he was doing with salt, pepper and a few other spices. I think his secret was using just a hint of hot pepper to give it a little zip.

That is what I pictured as a commercial kitchen. Out here in the woods? Nope, the commercial kitchens around where I live have about a 10 quart pot as their biggest pot. It would take them a year working around the clock to make all of the chicken bone broth I had chicken backs for.

I did a few different things to get rid of my thousands of pounds of chicken backs.

I started feeding them to the kitties. I chopped up packages of frozen backs with an axe and fed them to our barn cats. I would do one back per day among about three females and a tomcat.

It worked on the kittles at least. The next year we had a HUGE crop of kittens. There were probably 30 kittens running around the yard and needing to be fed. I got up to a 5 pound package of chicken backs per day.

The kitties were all pretty wild and would come out to eat their chicken but would not let me pet them.

I still had thousands of pounds (about 4000 lbs) of chicken backs. I started calling around to find some place that might want them. I even brought some out in the pasture and took them out of their packages and left them for the coyotes, hawks, eagles and buzzards. The backs would always be gone the next morning when I went to check on them. I know the wild animals liked it but I didn’t know if it was legal or not and it isn’t really my job to feed the wild animals. Better for them and everybody else for them to rustle for their own living.

Then my calls yielded fruit and I found a place over in Minnesota that studied wolves and they would be glad to take the backs. I wrote donation letters with every delivery and they signed the letters so that I could deduct the cost of the backs from my taxable income. Definitely not as good as selling them but better than nothing. At least somebody was learning something about the wolves.

I talked the chicken processor lady into doing the math to see if it would work for her to make broth. I told her that if she could get anywhere close to the prices she would see by googling pastured chicken, I would most definitely get chicken broth made.

There were other chicken guys than me who wanted broth. Heck, If she could cook chicken broth. Maybe she would be one step closer to making beef bone broth!

We are still working out what it will take to make beef bone broth. Stay tuned to this channel. When we get some, I will definitely let you know.

She finally did the math and figured out that it would cost more for her to buy a pot than she could swing herself. She asked if I would go in with her and a few others buying a pot. I said I would like to help but I didn’t want to own part of a big pot since I absolutely had no place to put it if things went south. Plus being part owner in a big pot might bring about strange business entanglements that I didn’t want. She said that I could take my chunk of pot payments out of the next year’s chicken processing fees. I jumped at the chance.

She got the pot and it sat in her garage for a year while she was deciding whether she could actually build a separate kitchen or would need to shoehorn it into her chicken processing facility. Costs for setting up a whole commercial kitchen were too high so she got out her shoe horn…

This year the pot went into operation. She uses it on light days and says that most of the broth will get made in the winter when there are no chickens to process.

We now have chicken broth. It is on the website for sale. The website is: www.NorthPastureFarms.com. Just do a search for broth in the store and that should do it. Note that our chicken broth is meant for cooking as well as just heating and sipping. If you want to do the sipping thing, add some salt unless you like it totally bland. I like Lowry’s seasoned salt and just a sprinkle of hot pepper in mine.

I want to:

A. Get something out of all those chicken backs. The more we can use every part of the animal, the better we will be in my opinion.

B. Provide a good, healthy product for a fair exchange.

Uses:

Chicken Broth is actually pretty versatile. It can be used for many things beyond just making soup. It can enhance the flavor and moisture of various dishes.

For most of the below I would like to thank my friendly local AI. I checked out a bunch of the links and they all seem legit.

· Soups and stews. Chicken noodle soup, chicken tortilla soup, broccoli cheese soup, and different types of stews. It can also be used to add ‘body’ in soups and stews made with other meats. A food with body is generally thought to have a depth and intensity of flavor. Not a thin watery thing. My theory is that this is because of the chicken fat in chicken broth. Fat coats the taste buds and makes the flavors of the food stick to them. So the flavor feels more intense. That is why a rich chocolate, or a rich ice cream tastes so good. Chicken Fat has a low melting point so it imparts flavor very well.

· Cooking grains. Substitute water with chicken broth when cooking rice, quinoa, couscous or pasta for added flavor and richness.

· Sauces and gravies. Chicken broth can be used to deglaze pans. I had to look up what deglazing means. It is ‘a culinary technique where liquid (like wine, stock or even water) is added to a hot pan to loosen and dissolve the flavorful browned bits (called fond) left behind after searing meat or vegetables.’ AI did me a solid there. Hmmm, now I know what my Ma was doing when she was making that good gravy.

· Braising and poaching: Use chicken broth to braise meats like chicken thighs or poach chicken breasts or fish. This will add extra flavor and keep them moist.

· Casseroles and stuffing. Chicken broth can be incorporated into casseroles, stuffing or even stuffed vegetables to add moisture and flavor. Says the Pioneer Woman.

· That Pioneer Woman link has 21 recipes where chicken broth is the ‘secret ingredient’. Maybe not a secret any more. The Pioneer Woman is pretty popular.

· Steaming vegetables: Instead of plain water, use chicken broth to steam vegetables, infusing them with savory flavor.

· Other dishes: Chicken broth can add savory depth to dishes like risotto, grits, chili, enchilada sauces, and even marinara sauce.

Chicken broth also has some good health benefits:

· Hydration: Chicken broth is a hydrating and nutritious beverage.

· Vitamins and minerals: It contains essential vitamins, minerals and protein. Chicken backs have a lot of bone in them so our chicken broth has a lot of collagen and other healing properties.

· Gut health: Chicken broth is a natural source of amino acids that can support gut health and digestion, helping the body absorb nutrients.

· Immunity: Chicken broth may have immune-boosting properties and can be beneficial when recovering from illness, according to research from the NIH.

· Joint health: The collagen and amino acids found in chicken broth can promote healthy joints. It might not be as good at this as beef bone broth but it is a heck of a lot better than Sprite or a Monster drink.

No worries.

SV