Whole Crockpot Chicken and Bone Broth

I've done this once before and it turned out really nice.  Instead of roasting a whole chicken in the oven, do it in the Crockpot.  Ya, it takes longer, but I think it's worth it.  If you eat the skin and like it crispy, that's not going to happen here.

 

Most of the recipes I see tell you to ball up aluminum foil to keep the chicken off of the bottom of the crock so it doesn't sit in the juice and fat for hours.  For some reason I don't like the idea of the foil sitting at the bottom for all that time.  I think if you're not going to continue on with the bone broth the foil would be fine.

 

However, I'm going to use the carcas for a bone broth so this is what I did.

 

Cut 2 onions in half and place at the bottom of the crock.  This will not only raise the chicken off the bottom of the crock, it will add to the flavor.

 

Say hello to my leetle friend... I think this was like a 4 or 5 pound bird for about 7 bucks.  He was an amputee missing his left wing tip.

Seasonings included a lot of salt and pepper, paprika, onion and garlic powder.  I shoved a cut up onion and whole garlic cloves in the cavity and stuck slices of garlic on the bird.  I think next time I'm going to crush the garlic and spread it out under the skin.

This is, I believe, after 6 hours on low. 

After cooling, get all your meat off the bones.  This is very tasty, moist meat right here.  Do with it what you will...

Put all the skin, fat and bones back in the crock and fill it up with water 3/4 of the way.  Also throw in the stuff from the cavity goodie bag in now.  I sliced up the organs into smaller pieces.  Add about 3 tbs of vinager.  I had apple cider.  This helps the nutrients come out of the bones.

This is after 24 hours.  Looks pretty gross at this point.  Strain this into a bowl.

The way you know you have gotten all you can get out of the bones is that when you go to snap them they kind of just crumble.

This is after a night in the fridge.  All the fat comes to the surface so you can skim it off.

Get as much as you can off.

Now we have some rich, tasty bone broth.  There are lots you can do at this point.  I've read of people drinking this throughout the day.  Others keep it to cook with. This is what I did.

Divide it up into bags for freezing for later use.

 

I'm looking foward to cooking with this.  I did drink some that was left over from filling these bags and let me tell you... this stuff is rich. 



 

I plan on getting to a point where I do this every weekend and use it throughout the week.  You can make bone broth from beef bones too if you can get them from your store/butcher.

Speaking of, I need to start using a butcher instead of grocery stores.