The Roasted Ingredient That Will Make Your Chicken Broth Sing

Homemade chicken broth is a culinary staple that is useful for so much more than just making a hearty and comforting pot of chicken noodle soup. It's a great way to add flavor to side dishes like mashed potatoes and green beans, and it's a savory base for gravies and pan sauces. Chicken stock is Gordon Ramsay's secret to the best steak and Alex Guarnaschelli's secret to juicy turkey burgers. Even Ina Garten keeps chicken stock in her freezer as a quick way to add flavor to all sorts of dishes. Celebrity chefs and home chefs alike toss their leftover bones into a pot for broth when they're cooking. It pays off when you can use a little homemade broth from the freezer in dishes you make down the road.

Great chicken broth is made with chicken meat and bones, vegetables, spices, and herbs simmered low and slow for hours on a stovetop. Common ingredients in chicken broth are celery, garlic, onion, carrots, peppercorns, dried thyme, and rosemary. As these ingredients lightly boil, their flavors melt together into the broth. The longer you simmer the broth, the stronger the flavors become. You can make a great pot of chicken soup with simmered ingredients, but there is a secret to creating a truly stunning chicken broth: roast your chicken bones, first.

Roasted chicken bones add more flavor to your chicken broth because roasting caramelizes the surface of the bone, as well as the marrow, fat, and any meat leftover on the bones. The resulting umami-style flavor adds depth to your broth. Roasting chicken bones also helps draw out the collagen, which will lend that gelatinous, fatty quality to your broth. Brush your bones with something acidic, like a light coat of tomato paste, to further bring out the flavors and collagen, making a more substantial stock.

You can roast your chicken bones before adding them to a pot to simmer for homemade chicken broth in as little as 12 minutes if you use an air fryer, like this Instant Pot Vortex, set at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The method is simple; after deboning a batch of thighs or legs, toss the bones, extra fat, and skin into the air fryer. Once the bones, skin, and fat chunks have been roasted, put them directly into your pot for broth and simmer with all your other ingredients. 

You can also roast your chicken bones in the oven instead, at around 425 degrees Fahrenheit in a roasting pan or on a baking sheet with some parchment paper. Roast the bones for about 30 minutes until they've darkened in color, and then brush them with some tomato paste and put them back in the oven for 10 minutes, if needed.

Chicken stock and broth are so similar that they're often used interchangeably to describe the liquid resulting from a long, slow boil of chicken and other ingredients. Simply put, chicken broth is made with meat and chicken stock is made with bones and meat. So, when you're adding roasted bones to your chicken broth, you're technically changing the dish from broth to stock. The difference hinges on the fact that boiling bones introduces gelatin to the mix, released by heating the collagen and connective tissue in the bones. Recipes for chicken broth often direct you to add bones to the pot, however, and the two can be used in the same dishes.

Broth and stock with roasted chicken bones have a deeper flavor than broth just made with boiled chicken, and there a few other tricks you can use to make a batch of unforgettable broth. Simmer for 4-6 hours, or longer, for an intensely flavorful and nutrient-rich broth. Add lemon juice to your chicken broth for incredible homemade chicken noodle soup, or a splash of vodka for a unique twist. You can add sautéed onion and garlic to your soup for even more flavor, make it creamy with coconut milk or sour cream, and even bring on the heat with a few peppers. Regardless of how you dress it up, chicken broth with roasted bones will provide a great base for a delicious dish.