Recipe: Turkey Carcass Stock

In my quest to bring you the easiest (laziest) recipes possible, I present: Thirty-Second Stock. (Thirty seconds to get started, that is. The part where you pick the meat off the carcass at the end takes significantly more time.)

Sure, you could go online and find a respectable recipe like this one, but maybe you don’t want to spend a lot of time chopping celery and quartering onions and trying to figure out where the heck you’re going to find “sprigs of thyme.”

A bonus: You’ll get a lot more meat. When the turkey cooks to the ideal temperature for eating, the legs and breast are perfectly done, but the meat nearest the bone is still tough and hard to remove. When I did this last night (of course my recipes are all kitchen-tested, you think I’m making this stuff up?) I liberated another four cups of meat (!) from our sixteen-pound turkey.

Here we go:

1) Upend the turkey carcass and stuff it into a big pot. It might stick out the top a little. Wash your hands and mash it down if you can. Otherwise, don’t worry about it. It’ll loosen up and collapse as it cooks.

Excelsteel 16 Quart Stainless Steel Stockpot With Encapsulated Base, 4.5 stars on Amazon — Something like this one.

2) Sprinkle lots of Montreal Chicken Seasoning all over the carcass.

Contains sulfiting agents, so if you're allergic, just use garlic and onion powder instead. — Contains garlic, onion, orange peel, red pepper, and a bunch of other stuff I’m glad someone else put together so I don’t have to

2a) Optional: Add turmeric for color and brain health. Throw in the giblets if you have them.

3) Fill the pot with water and cook on a low boil for at least 3 hours.

4) Wait for it to cool off so you don’t burn your hands (at least a half hour). Lift the carcass into a baking pan or a big platter, pick the meat off and save for later. Strain the broth into a container.

I like glass containers, because I don’t really trust hot liquid and plastic.

4a) Did you remember to throw in the giblets? Now you can eat them! Consuming the heart of the turkey is said to endow the eater with the bird’s legendary bravery and cunning. The liver is delicious. And if you want to do some fancy gizzard thing, more power to you.

5) Obligatory Spam mention: Serve with a side of fried Spam.

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