Big Savings

[jennythereader]

I just did the math for how much money I saved last weekend by making my own chicken stock.

I made 6.75 quarts. My local grocery store sells low sodium, organic chicken stock for $3.99 a quart. That means that right now I have $26.93 worth of stock in the freezer. Maybe a little less, because while all the vegetables I used were organic, the chicken wasn't. Let's call it $25.00 even.

How much did it cost me to make?

Nothing.

Or at least, nothing more than I would have spent anyway in the course of a couple of weeks. Every major ingredient in that stock was something that a few years ago I would have thrown away. The meat and bones were the carcass of a chicken I had roasted earlier in the week. After we had dinner that night, we pulled all the meat we could off of it, and then stashed what was left in the freezer. The vegetables were things like carrot tops, celery leaves, slightly mushy leeks, and other things that I wasn't going to use in any other recipe. The only other ingredients were water, a little salt, a little apple cider vinegar, and some peppercorns.

Added: I maybe spent $5.00 on those additional ingredients. Probably less, but it might have been that much. That's at least $20 less than it would have cost me to buy the same amount of stock. That doesn't sound like much, but if I make the same amount every couple of months it will save me at least $100 over the course of a year.

I'd like to do the same sort of analysis for my homemade applesauce, but I didn't do as good a job tracking how much I made, and I didn't track how many apples I used for it at all. I suspect the savings aren't as dramatic as for the stock. /Added

I started with the stock instructions posted by meilin_miranda over in the BPAL forums a long time ago and adapted and changed to suit my taste. I've already started filling up the giant ziploc bag in the freezer for the next round.

Comments

[11th-letter.livejournal.com]

I make chicken stock the same way...actually even more economically, because I don't bother to add any vegetables to it most of the time. Just the chicken carcasses and whatever half-eaten drumsticks the kids leave over. (Yes, I know, they've been bitten on some, but the stock is boiled for like 12 hours.) If I happen to think of it, I might toss an onion in there...but I don't really notice the veggies make much of a difference in the taste. Everything I can think of that uses chicken stock has seasonings added, so I just don't bother adding them to the stock itself.

[jennythe-reader.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't buy veggies just for stock, but using up the ones that came in the farm share and are a little less fresh than I want to really cook with seems to work pretty well. Also stuff like the ends of carrots and other wasted parts.

[stefka.livejournal.com]

As Kae says. :)

We keep a baggie in the freezer specifically for bits-of-vegetable-that-aren't-going-into-recipes: carrot ends, celery leaves, that leftover chunk of onion you're never going to use, etc. Then, when I have time to make soup or stock, in it goes!

Also, when we've finished a ham or a chicken or whatever, and there's that lovely "jelly" in the bottom of the pan, I scoop that into ice cube trays and freeze it. Pop the cubes out of the trays and into yet more baggies. Patrick will add a couple cubes to the water when he's boiling potatoes, or they can go int the soup, or whatever other use comes handy.

Applesauce. Must make applesauce this week. And pie filling, even if all I do is container-up sliced apples and sugar, and not even cook it all, yet. Hmm.

[jennythe-reader.livejournal.com]

The "baggie in the freezer" is what I'm doing, too.

Some of this batch of stock ended up in cube form, but I didn't include it in my math. If I had, the savings would probably be even higher. :)

[vengeful-god.livejournal.com]

See, I gave up Livejournal, but seeing the teaser post on Google + I came back to read. Nicely done...how long did you cook the stock?

[jennythe-reader.livejournal.com]

:) Glad I was able to entice you back.

It was 4 or 5 hours. The instructions I have say 2 is the absolute minimum, 4 is better, and if you can manage more that's great.