How to Make Soup Stock
By Mia Hartwell
Homemade stock is the thing that quietly separates a soup that tastes fine from one that tastes like somebody cooked it properly. It is also, slightly absurdly, made almost entirely from things you were about to throw away. A chicken carcass, the onion skins, the woody ends of celery, a few carrot peels, and some water. That is it.
The first time I made stock I did nearly everything wrong. I boiled it hard because I assumed faster was better, I salted it because that is what you do with food, and I threw the vegetables in at the start and left them there for four hours. What I got was cloudy, oddly bitter, and far too salty once I reduced it. Every one of those mistakes has a simple fix.
This guide covers the whole thing: the difference between stock and broth, the base method that works for any of them, exact simmer times for chicken, beef, vegetable, and fish, and how to cool and store it safely so a batch actually lasts. Once it becomes routine you will find yourself keeping a scrap bag in the freezer without thinking about it.
Stock vs Broth: What Is the Difference?
The terms get used interchangeably on packaging, but in a kitchen they mean different things, and knowing which one you want changes how you cook it.
Stock is made mainly from bones and simmered for a long time. The point is to extract collagen, which turns to gelatin and gives the liquid real body, a silky weight on the tongue, and the tendency to set to a soft jelly in the fridge. That wobble is the sign of a good stock. It is left unsalted because it is a building block for something else.
Broth is made mainly from meat or vegetables rather than bones, simmered for less time, and seasoned so you can drink it as it is. It is lighter, thinner, and more directly flavored. And bone broth, despite the name, is essentially a stock simmered even longer, then seasoned and sipped.
If a light, seasoned broth is actually what you are after, our guide on how to make chicken broth covers that method, including how to get several cups of cooked chicken out of the same pot.
For most cooking, stock is what you want. It is the more useful of the two because you can always season it later, and its body improves everything from a creamy tomato soup to a pan sauce.
What You Need
- Bones or scraps. A leftover roast chicken carcass is ideal. Wings, backs, and feet give the most gelatin. For vegetable stock, a freezer bag of trimmings.
- Mirepoix. Onion, carrot, and celery in a rough 2:1:1 ratio by weight. No need to peel, just wash well.
- Aromatics. Bay leaf, black peppercorns, parsley stems, and a thyme sprig. Keep it restrained so the stock stays versatile.
- A large stockpot. Tall and narrow beats wide and shallow, since less surface area means slower evaporation.
- A fine mesh strainer. Lined with cheesecloth if you want it crystal clear.
- Shallow containers. For cooling it quickly and safely, which matters more than people expect.
How to Make Stock, Step by Step
This is the master method. The only things that change between chicken, beef, vegetable, and fish are what goes in the pot and how long it stays there.
Roast the bones, if you want a deeper stock
For a brown stock with a darker colour and a roasted, savory depth, spread the bones on a tray and roast at 450F for 30 to 40 minutes until well coloured. Scrape the browned bits from the tray into the pot as well, since that is concentrated flavor. For a lighter, more delicate white stock, skip this entirely and go straight to the pot.
Cover with cold water
Put the bones in the stockpot and add cold water to cover by about 2 inches, no more. Starting with cold water rather than hot lets the proteins come out slowly and rise to the surface where you can remove them, which gives a noticeably clearer result. Drowning the bones in extra water just dilutes everything.
Bring it to a bare simmer
Heat it slowly until the surface is barely moving, around 180 to 190F, with a lazy bubble breaking every second or two. Do not let it boil. Boiling emulsifies the fat into the liquid and clouds the stock permanently, and it is the mistake that ruins more homemade stock than anything else.
Skim the foam
For the first twenty to thirty minutes a grey-brown foam will rise. Lift it off with a ladle each time it collects. This is coagulated protein, and if you leave it to break up and disperse it will make the finished stock murky and give it a slightly muddy taste. After the first half hour it mostly stops.
Add vegetables and aromatics near the end
Add the onion, carrot, celery, bay leaf, peppercorns, and herb stems for the final hour only. Vegetables give up their flavor within about an hour, and anything past that starts tasting stewed and flat rather than fresh. The bones are the part that needs the long haul, not the mirepoix.
Simmer for the right length of time
Chicken bones want 3 to 4 hours, beef and other dense red meat bones want 6 to 8, vegetables want only 45 to 60 minutes, and fish bones should never exceed 45 minutes. Top up with a little water if the level drops below the bones. Still no salt at this stage.
Strain, then cool it quickly
Ladle most of the stock out, then pour the rest through a fine mesh strainer without pressing the solids. Then cool it fast: divide it between shallow containers or sit the pot in an ice bath, aiming to get it below 70F within 2 hours and into the fridge within 4 more. A big pot left on the counter overnight sits in the bacterial danger zone for hours, so this step is about safety rather than fussiness.
Simmer Times by Type
| Stock | Made From | Simmer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken | Carcass, wings, backs, feet | 3 to 4 hours | The all purpose default, gels well |
| Beef | Marrow and knuckle bones, roasted | 6 to 8 hours | Dense bones need the long haul |
| Vegetable | Onion, carrot, celery, mushroom, scraps | 45 to 60 min | Longer turns it bitter, not richer |
| Fish | Non oily bones and heads | 30 to 45 min | Never longer, it goes bitter fast |
Vegetable Stock from Scraps
This is the one to start with if you have never made stock, because it costs nothing and takes an hour. Keep a zip bag in the freezer and add trimmings as you cook: onion skins and ends, carrot peels, celery leaves and bases, leek tops, herb stems, mushroom stalks, garlic skins, and corn cobs. When the bag is full, tip it into a pot, cover with water, and simmer gently for 45 to 60 minutes.
Two things to avoid. Skip brassicas, meaning broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts, which turn sulphurous and unpleasant over a long simmer. And skip starchy vegetables like potato, which break down and leave the stock cloudy and slightly gluey. Everything past its prime should go in the bin rather than the pot, since stock concentrates flavors rather than hiding them.
Vegetable stock is what makes meat-free cooking taste like it has depth, and it is worth having on hand if you cook from our vegetarian dinners regularly.
How to Store It
Once chilled, stock keeps for 3 to 4 days in the fridge and 4 to 6 months in the freezer. A layer of fat will set on top in the fridge, and it is worth leaving it there until you use the stock, since it seals the surface. Lift it off in one piece when you need it, and save it if it is chicken fat, which is excellent for roasting potatoes.
For freezing, portion it before it goes in. Freeze most of it in one or two cup containers for soups, and freeze the rest in ice cube trays, then transfer the cubes to a bag. Those small measures are perfect for deglazing a pan, loosening a sauce, or finishing a risotto without defrosting a whole tub. Leave headroom in any container, because stock expands as it freezes.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Stock is hard to ruin outright, but these are the mistakes that turn a good batch into a cloudy, bitter, or over-salted one.
Letting it boil instead of simmer
This is the single most common reason homemade stock comes out cloudy and greasy. A rolling boil physically churns the rendered fat and fine protein particles back into the liquid and emulsifies them, and once that happens there is no way to separate them again. Boiling also agitates the bones enough to release fine sediment.
Do this instead: Keep it at a bare simmer around 180 to 190F, where a single lazy bubble breaks the surface every second or two. If it starts rolling, pull the pot half off the burner.
Salting the stock
Stock is an ingredient, not a finished dish, and it is very often reduced later to concentrate its flavor for a sauce, a risotto, or a gravy. Salt does not evaporate, so anything you add now gets concentrated along with everything else. A stock that tasted pleasantly seasoned in the pot can become genuinely inedible once it has been reduced by half.
Do this instead: Leave it completely unsalted and season the finished dish instead. You keep full control that way, whatever you end up using it for.
Not skimming the foam
In the first twenty or thirty minutes a layer of grey-brown foam rises to the surface. That is coagulated protein and impurities coming out of the bones, and if you leave it there it breaks up and disperses back through the liquid. The stock ends up murky with a slightly muddy, livery taste that no amount of straining afterwards will fix.
Do this instead: Stay near the pot for the first half hour and lift the foam off with a ladle or a fine skimmer as it forms. After that it largely stops and you can leave it alone.
Adding the vegetables at the very start
Bones need hours, but vegetables do not. Onion, carrot, and celery give up everything they have within about an hour, and past that they start breaking down and contributing a dull, stewed, faintly sweet flavor instead of a fresh aromatic one. Six hours of simmered celery does not taste like celery any more.
Do this instead: Add the vegetables and aromatics for the final hour of cooking only. The bones can go the whole distance on their own.
Using brassicas and starchy vegetables
Broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts release sulphur compounds when simmered for a long time, which gives stock a distinctly unpleasant eggy smell. Potatoes and other starchy vegetables are a different problem: they break down and cloud the liquid, leaving it thick and slightly gluey rather than clean.
Do this instead: Stick to onion, carrot, celery, leek, mushroom, and herb stems. A rough 2:1:1 ratio of onion to carrot to celery is the classic starting point.
Drowning the bones in water
It is tempting to fill the pot, but every extra inch of water dilutes the same fixed amount of collagen and flavor the bones can give. The result is a thin, watery stock that never gels and tastes faintly of nothing. People then blame the bones when the actual problem was the ratio.
Do this instead: Cover the bones by about 2 inches, no more. If the level drops below the bones during a long simmer, top it up, but only just enough.
Leaving the pot on the counter to cool overnight
A big pot of stock holds heat for hours and cools through the temperature range where bacteria multiply fastest, right in the middle of it. This is a genuine food safety issue rather than a matter of taste, and a large stockpot left out overnight can easily stay warm enough to be unsafe well into the morning.
Do this instead: Cool it fast: divide it into shallow containers or sit the pot in an ice bath, aiming to get below 70F within 2 hours and into the fridge within 4 more.
Pressing the solids when straining
Squeezing the bones and vegetables against the strainer to extract the last of the liquid forces fine particles of broken down vegetable and sediment straight through the mesh. You gain maybe half a cup of stock and lose the clarity you spent four hours protecting by simmering gently and skimming carefully.
Do this instead: Ladle the stock out first, then pour the rest through a fine mesh strainer and let it drain under its own weight. Discard the solids without pressing.
What to Do With Your Stock
Once you have a batch, the difference shows up everywhere. Soups are the obvious use, and a homemade stock transforms something as simple as a lentil soup or a creamy tomato soup, where there is nowhere for a thin, salty cube to hide.
Beyond soup, use it anywhere a recipe calls for liquid. Risotto is the clearest example, since a mushroom risotto is essentially rice cooked in stock and tastes exactly as good as the stock you use. It gives body to a slow cooker beef stew and a chicken pot pie, and depth to a ground beef chili. It is also the easiest way to make cheap ingredients taste expensive, which is the whole principle behind most budget meals.
The short version
Cover bones with cold water by 2 inches. Bring to a bare simmer, never a boil, and skim the foam for the first half hour. Add mirepoix and aromatics for the last hour only. Simmer 3 to 4 hours for chicken, 6 to 8 for beef, 45 to 60 minutes for vegetables. No salt. Strain without pressing, cool it fast in shallow containers, and refrigerate or freeze.
Start with a leftover roast chicken carcass and a bag of vegetable scraps, since neither costs you anything, and see how different the next pot of soup tastes. Once you have made it twice it stops feeling like a project and starts feeling like the obvious thing to do with the bones.
If you like the idea of making one thing ahead that quietly improves everything else, garlic confit works on the same principle and takes about an hour.
When you are ready to use it, browse all our recipes or dig into the slow cooker recipes, where a good stock does the most work of all.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between stock and broth?+
Stock is made primarily from bones and simmered for hours, which draws out collagen and gives it body and a silky texture that sets to jelly in the fridge. It is left unseasoned so it can be used as an ingredient. Broth is made mostly from meat or vegetables, simmered for a shorter time, and seasoned so it can be sipped on its own. Stock is a building block, broth is closer to a finished soup.
How long should you simmer stock?+
It depends entirely on what is in the pot. Chicken stock needs 3 to 4 hours, beef and other red meat bones need 6 to 8 because they are denser, vegetable stock is finished in 45 to 60 minutes, and fish stock should never go past about 45 minutes or it turns bitter. Simmering vegetable or fish stock for hours does not improve it, it actively ruins it.
Why is my stock cloudy?+
You boiled it instead of simmering it. A rolling boil churns fat and fine protein particles back into the liquid and emulsifies them, which permanently clouds the stock and can make it taste greasy. Keep it at a bare simmer, around 180 to 190F, where you see a lazy bubble break the surface every second or two. Cloudy stock is still perfectly good to eat, it just will not be clear.
Should you salt stock?+
No, leave it unsalted. Stock is an ingredient rather than a finished dish, and it is often reduced later to concentrate flavor. Any salt you add now gets concentrated along with everything else, so a stock that tasted balanced in the pot can turn inedibly salty once it is reduced into a sauce or a risotto. Season the finished dish instead.
How long does homemade stock last?+
Three to four days in the fridge in a sealed container, or four to six months in the freezer. Cool it quickly before it goes in, then leave the layer of fat that sets on top undisturbed, since it seals the surface and helps it keep. Freezing it in ice cube trays is worth doing, because it gives you small measures for deglazing a pan or loosening a sauce.
Can you make stock from vegetable scraps?+
Yes, and it is the cheapest stock there is. Keep a bag in the freezer and add onion skins, carrot peels, celery ends, leek tops, herb stems, and mushroom stalks as you cook. Once it is full, cover with water and simmer for 45 to 60 minutes. Avoid brassicas like broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower, which turn sulphurous and bitter, and skip anything past its best.