From Alex Province : Put on a big pot of water, throw in the turkey carcass, and you’ll have the base for a fantastic “freezer” soup before you know it. That’s what Matt and I do every Thanksgiving night while cleaning up the kitchen. Here’s the formula… turkey carcass plus aromatic vegetables and simmering makes a rich stock that can be used for soup, as the liquid for cooking rice, or to make soupy noodles when there’s a chill in the air. You can also add some of this stock to turkey chili to give it richness.
Ingredients
- turkey carcass picked clean of meat
- 1 onion large, quartered
- 2 carrots roughly chopped
- 3 stalks celery halved
- 1 pepper green, quartered and seeded
- 1 clove garlic whole
- 1 bunch parsley flat leaf
- 2 bay leaves
- 12 peppercorns whole
- 1 tablespoon salt or to taste
Servings:
Instructions
- In a large stock or pasta pot, add the turkey carcass and vegetables and cover with water. Bring it to a simmer.
- When froth forms, skim and remove it with a large spoon, then add salt and peppercorns. Continue simmering for 2 to 3 hours. The liquid will reduce slightly.
- Carefully strain the hot liquid through a sieve, being sure to press the vegetables and bones with the back of a wooden spoon to extract the flavor.
- Divide the liquid into several containers and place them in the refrigerator to cool. They will last several days in the fridge or freeze them, as we like to do, for future use.
Always a Bennett tradition too. I must admit I get tired of smelling it throughout the house for hours and hours. But I agree it’s yummy later in the season with noodles and veggies and of course some of the leftover turkey from Thanksgiving dinner!
If you roast the turkey carcass in the oven and then immerse in the water, the flavor becomes deeper and more interesting.
Thank you for the awesome tip!
Some helpful tips: 1) You will need a big pot to accommodate the whole turkey and cover it with water. If you cut up the turkey, you will cover it with less water, so it will be more concentrated, and you may want to add water later to make it taste right. 2) This will make A LOT of stock, so be ready with sturdy containers (that won’t melt with hot liquid) that will add up to 24 ounces or more of liquid. 3) Before you put stock in the containers, you need to first fish out the bones and spent veggies (they’re flavorless and useless after the cooking), and then you need to strain the liquid through a fine mesh strainer. So you need to assemble a stock cooking pot, a garbage pot, a strainer, and a strained stock pot before you start. 4) If your stock doesn’t cool down to the refrigerator temperature within a couple hours, it could start to breed some bacteria, so when you use it again, you might want to boil it for 10 minutes or so just to make sure it’s safe. Homemade stock is the most delicious and wonderful thing to have in the freezer. You’ll feel like such a cooking pro after you’ve made it!