I don’t know about you, but we use a lot of broth here on the AVF. Mostly chicken broth. And I confess, we buy most of it in the grocery store. (Horror!)
But after today…no more! We have made our first batch of Homemade Chicken Broth and I am sold! What a cool process, and what a delicious result. I never knew it was so easy. If I had, we’d have done this sooner, that’s for sure.
Now just so you know, for you traditional homesteaders out there, no I have not been saving all my vegetable peelings and cutoffs. (Again, horror!) But I’m going to! (As a matter of fact, I think we’ll do a whole separate blog post about that.)
But for this adventure, we did go buy our vegetables. And they actually weren’t that expensive. 
Maybe $8 for a bag of celery, a bag of carrots, a 5 pound bag of yellow onions and a package of fresh thyme. Most of those, I’ll use several times or for other meals.
So with that in mind, it was really pretty cheap.
But onto our real big news…
So the real kicker today was our decision to do this in the Instant Pot. I know, I know…a lot of our homesteader friends are sort of Purists when it comes to doing things. And they just can’t seem to embrace the Instant Pot. But I say, “What’s the big deal?”
The Instant Pot is essentially just a self-contained pressure cooker. I mean, yeah, it can do other things, but at its core, most of us gravitate to it because it cooks stuff fast. Translation: It’s a pressure cooker.
With the Instant Pot, it drastically reduced our cook time. Like from 3-4 hours, to cooking, unattended, for just 2 hours, I was all over it.
One thing I will suggest for all you Instant Pot users. You know it comes with a 3-foot long power cord. And that’s perfectly fine for most uses. If you use yours on the counter, right by an outlet, then no problem. We use ours on the stove a lot though, so we need a little more reach. So I ordered a 6-foot cord from Amazon and it was totally worth it. I’ll add a link here, in case you want one. I highly recommend it.
So, with vegetables, chicken and aromatics in the Instant Pot, we sealed and dialed in the cook time. 120 minutes later, we had something that was making the house smell some kind of good!
We let it sit for another hour. Then strained everything, cooled it overnight, then wound up with a gallon of the richest, most beautiful Chicken Broth you could ask for. And not a single preservative, artificial coloring, chemical or boogeyman in the whole thing.
At the end of the day, was it worth it? You bet it was. This was so easy. I can’t believe we hadn’t done it sooner.
But one thing’s for sure…we are making something delicious with it tonight!
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