The Easiest Way to Turn 1 Chicken into 20+ Meals (how to boil a chicken, make chicken noodle soup & chicken stock)

Free of gluten, dairy, soy, nuts, and corn

My mum has always made chicken noodle soup and turkey soup out of leftover carcasses from Thanksgiving or the odd time she baked a whole chicken. I'm not much of a meat-eater, but I certainly like the idea of making the most out of it for the purposes of saving money (meat is expensive, after all) as well as ensuring that some little bird didn't give up it's life just so I can have a drumstick. 

My mum always baked her birds, but when I started making chicken soup myself I was doing my Masters degree and had almost no time to cook - as in I was mostly eating salad and popcorn for dinner.  Baking a chicken and then making soup seemed like far too much work.

So I learned to boil chicken. Not surprisingly, it always comes out moist. The cooking water lightly flavours the chicken and then makes for great chicken stock, which can then be turned into noodle soup. Then I pop the bones into my crockpot, simmer it for a day, and Voila, I have like 20 meals for all of $5-7 and a minimal amount of work.

Here's how I do it.... 


I get myself a whole small chicken, or a half chicken, ideally organic or at least hormone free certified humane free range chicken.

The ones that I can usually get my hands on have already been cleaned, and don't often come with giblets, so I'm going to presume that you've already taken care of your chicken's innards and done with them what you will.

This recipe is super, super flexible and I usually just end up using whatever bits and pieces are kicking around in my freezer and fridge, which makes it ridiculously frugal.  Here's a super basic recipe. Feel free to experiment! 


Here's what you'll need for the boiled chicken and noodle soup:

1 chicken (mine are usually around 4lb)
Vegetable scraps (optional, see below for details)
2 carrots, 1 peeled and cut into 1" chunks, one peeled and cut into thin rounds
1 medium onion, quartered
2 bay leaves
1/2 bunch parsley
A few handfuls of rice vermicelli or bean thread noodles
Salt and pepper to taste
Bragg Liquid Amino(optional, for extra flavour. It's gluten free but not soy free)

How to Boil a Chicken

Rinse your chicken* (or not, see note at end of post) and place it into a pot large enough that

you can throw in scraps and have water to cover it all

I have a Cuisine Art Green Gourmet set similar to this Cuisineart Cookware Set , and I'm very happy with it - it's ceramic and free of any toxic chemicals. I use the 6 quart stock pot and it fits my chicken perfectly.  My set also came with an extra Cuisinart Stainless Steel 6-Quart Sauce Pot that I use sometimes as well, although they come in much larger sizes also. Both pots work great for huge batches of soup.

I've learned over the years that it's well worth the investment to pay for good quality pots, especially if they will last forever and don't release toxic chemicals into the environment, like a lot of teflon coated non-stick pots and pans!! 

Now I keep a container in my freezer for vegetable scraps, like carrot peelings, onion skins, parsley/herb stems, fennel fronds, celery tops, water used to cook vegetables, etc.   

Almost anything except cruciferous veggies will work in this (they get stinky and throw the flavour off), I've also discovered that apple peels add a nice flavour. 

Below is one of my containers with carrot and parsnip peelings, as well as some kale stems.

Add your scraps, one of the carrots (the one chopped into 1" chunks), onion, bay leaves, and parsley. cover with water. 

For this chicken I also had some celery fronds and something dark green I don't recall!

Bring water to a boil, then cover and reduce to a simmer. Simmer for 1 - 1.5 hrs, until chicken is cooked. You'll know when you can slice into the chicken and it is white inside and the juices run clear, instead of pink or red.

Carefully remove the chicken from the hot water.  Reserve the liquid.

You will know your chicken is cooked when the bones and flesh easily come apart. 

How I Divide a Chicken

Now here's how I divide my chicken up into meals.

When a chicken is boiled it makes the flesh just fall off the bones, so you can really pick off almost every teeny tiny piece of meat. So I strip everything and organize it into containers as I go.

In truth, as you can see from above, the meat from one little chicken can actually be used in about 24 meals in total!!  And we haven't even gotten to the carcass yet!

I use the big chunks to base a meal around. Serve it with Gluten Free Vegetarian Gravy (weird, I know, but after being vegetarian for 8 years this is the only way I know how to make gravy!), cranberry sauce, or whatever else you like. We eat the big pieces over the course of a couple of days. One 4lb chicken gives us enough large chunks for 2 meals for 2 people.

Then, the medium sized bits I divide up into small containers and freeze them. I only use small amounts to toss into things like stir fries, bean dip, or soups. To defrost them, I just soak the bits in warm water for a couple of minutes. We use just enough to add a bit of flavour and protein, so it really stretches out the chicken. 

Then, the teeny tiny bits, not so pretty kind of ugly bits I reserve to make my chicken noodle soup.

So here's how I make my soup: 

How to Make Chicken Noodle Soup

Strain the liquid used to boil chicken. 

I use a small Fine Mesh Strainer (like the one linked) to scoop out the large chunks, then pour the liquid through double layers of cheesecloth or a flour sack. I prefer Flour Sack Towels like the linked ones because they're washable and reusable, and can be used to cleaning, cooking, and I've seen some people online decorate or embroider them as gifts.  

Straining is an important step, because there's tons of gunky stuff that collects in there. 

 I place a strainer over a large bowl, then line the strainer with my flour sack and pour the soup through it. I give the sack a twist and press it with a wooden spoon to press out all the good stock. All the scooped out veggies can be composted or discarded.

 This is some of the gunky leftover sediment.

  
Rinse out your stock pot, then pour the stock back in. Add the one leftover carrot that's been sliced into rounds and vermicelli noodles. I often add an extra couple of cups of water.   

Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook for 10-15 minutes, until carrots and noodles are soft. Add salt, pepper and Bragg to taste.

Then, I cool the soup in the fridge, ladle into freezer-safe containers (I use old yogurt containers), divide my small little chicken bits amongst the containers, label them with the date and title, and freeze. I usually get 3 yogurt containers worth, which I can take out for a quick lunch or dinner. I just slide it out of the container and into a pot and defrost on the stove over medium heat for about 10 minutes.   

I like to have a couple of containers of homemade chicken noodle soup in the freezer at all times because my husband has the Epstein Barr virus, and I find that when he starts to get sick, I load him up with tea and soup and it really helps to build up the white blood cells to combat any infection (more on this in an upcoming post I've been planning)

How to Make Chicken Stock / Bone Broth

 So once the chicken is boiled and my soup is underway, I pop the leftover bones into my new Hamilton Beach 5-Quart Slow Cooker to make bone broth. 

I do this almost the same way I make the stock. I cover the carcass with filtered water, almost to the brim of my crockpot, add another onion, some more vegetable peelings (again, apple peels are awesome for this, and last time I had a hollowed out pumpkin that I threw in as well!), another couple of bay leaves and then I let this simmer for about 24 hours on low heat (you want this above 140F so the chicken doesn't go bad).

This is awesome because it makes my whole apartment smells like chicken soup.

Then I strain it the same way I did the chicken soup, season with some salt and pepper, cool it, label it, and freeze it.  I can get another 4 large yogurt containers with this, and we use it for things like stews, cooking rice in, and so on.

So really, you can see that my one 4lb $7 chicken actually gets the 2 of us a freezer full of meals. I only do this once every couple of months because we don't go through it very quickly.

Incidentally, a while back I made some chicken drumsticks baked with a super spicy jerk sauce I'd picked up at the local Asian market. I rinsed the drumsticks clean before making the broth, but they still made for a rather spicy broth (which my husband loved, but I'm not as fond of hot foods), so beware that whatever you season your chicken with, your broth will probably have some of that flavour!

Do you make chicken soup or broth? How do you stretch out your meat? 

Updated October 21, 2013
* Based on a comment on this post about rinsing chicken being unsanitary and spreading bacteria I did a little research. Turns out it's true, according to researchers at Drexel University, who found that bacteria can be spread by water droplets that splash off the chicken in a radius up to 2-3 feet. NBC news recently posted an article on it as well you can read here. I usually scrub and clean everything that comes in contact with my chicken after cooking with it, but I'll probably reconsider the whole rinsing thing. I still don't like the little bit of blood that is on chickens sometimes (call it the squeamishness of a former long-time vegetarian if you will), so I might have to figure out a way to rinse it without possibly spraying anything...

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