Cheap & Easy Homemade Bone Broth

Easy Weeknight Meals

By Susan Striegel

December 11, 2024

What do you do with the supermarket rotisserie chicken carcass after you’ve consumed the chicken? 

Most people throw it away…

But what if I told you that the chicken’s carcass has an easy and delicious second use, would you save it? 

With grocery prices continually on the rise, especially the cost of bone broth and produce, two things I love, it’s important to get the most out of everything we buy. When I buy a rotisserie chicken from Costco or Sams, I always save the carcass in a freezer bag in my freezer. And I also put the skins and scraps from the onions, carrots, and celery that I cut up for other meals into the same freezer bag. It’s something my late Grandmother, raised during the Great Depression, had done to get the most out of everything she had.

This easy bone broth recipe consists of a chicken carcass, salt, water, black pepper, a few garlic cloves (the kind in the jar you get at the store works just as good as fresh cloves), some vegetable scraps, and a slow cooker. That’s it. You can add fresh or dried herbs for extra flavor if you want, but it isn’t necessary. 

Ingredient List:

1 Slow Cooker

1 Chicken Carcass Freshly eaten or frozen.

   Frozen or Fresh Vegetable Scraps From.

• Onions (the onion skins and any other parts)

• Carrot Scraps

• Celery Scraps

• Garlic Scraps or Processed Jarred Garlic (2 tsps. jarred garlic)

Enough Water to Cover all of the Ingredients in the Slow Cooker

4 tsps. Kosher Salt

6 Peppercorns or 1 tsp Ground Pepper

Directions:

Mix the ingredients together and put the slow cooker on low. Let the broth simmer away for 8-12 hours. You can cook this on high for 6 hours. I cook it on low because it makes my house smell great all day long.

After cooking, strain the broth into a large measuring cup with a pour spout (this makes it easy to get it into a Mason Jar). I actually strain mine twice, once through a colander into the measuring cup. Second with a metal coffee filter from Ikea, it is a stainless fine mesh strainer. I have also placed a funnel onto a Mason Jar with a coffee filter placed in it. This works well too, but it is slower. 

Once you're done straining your broth you can enjoy it now or freeze it in a Mason Jar or other freezable container. I typically end up with three to four quarts of broth from one chicken carcass.