Quick & Easy Turkey Stock - Perfect for soup and gravy
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cook Time: 2 hours
Yield: 6-8 cups of turkey stock (depends on the size of your vessel)
On our last adventure together, we showed you how to make the most delicious, the most succulent Thanksgiving turkey ever by cooking it sous vide. And that process left us with a couple of gorgeous scraps that we are going to turn into a world-class turkey stock. This turkey stock is so flavorful, so perfect and so easy - it’s a great fall inspired treat for a cold day.
So even though this turkey stock would make an absolutely fantastic base for a soup, we’re actually going to be using it to make a totally keto, gluten-free turkey gravy to serve with our turkey on Thanksgiving Day.
So without further ado, let’s get started.
Our ingredients list is incredibly simple. We’re just going to take our leftover turkey scraps from the turkey we cooked sous-vide. For our purposes, we’re going to reserve the wing sections and the giblets for our gravy, so we’ll set those pieces aside and we’re only going to be using the main carcass for our stock. We’ve also got some aromatics here to give the stock some depth and color. I’ve got some carrots, leeks, celery and garlic here.
Finally, I’m going to throw a little bit of salt and pepper into the mix to season the stock. Typically you don’t want to season your stock until after it’s done cooking to avoid the risk of over-seasoning it, but I’ve made this recipe a few times and I know that this is a conservative amount, so I’ll get the seasoning going now and I’ll fine-tune at the end.
I’ve got a medium-sized instant pot, so I’m going to take this turkey carcass and make a cut right here down the middle of back to make sure that it fits well in my instant pot. If you don’t have an instant pot, that’s perfectly ok - you can just use a regular stock pot and let the stock simmer for 8-12 hours instead of pressure cooking it. I find that you’ll generally get richer and more flavorful results by cooking it on the stovetop, but I’ve got a lot of Thanksgiving dishes I’m making simultaneously here, so I’m going with the short cut method.
Next I’ll start peeling the carrots and rough chopping them into large chunks. I’ll also chop down the leeks and celery in the same way.
Next, we’ll start adding all of our ingredients to the pot. Once we’ve got all of our ingredients in there all nice and cozy, we’ll top off our pot with some water. Take care not to exceed the maximum fill capacity for your instant pot or you’ll literally have a hot mess on your hands. After that, it’s time to seal everything up and set your instant pot for 2 hours.
Okay, so it’s been a little more than 2 hours and the house smells incredible. Super important tip! It’s really important to let the instant pot release its pressure naturally or you’ll risk getting attacked by steam and spewing liquid. Trust me, I know from experience.
I think I’m just going to try to open it and hopefully it doesn’t explode
Next, take a colander and a large bowl and pour this liquid gold into the bowl through the colander. As a side note here, if you don’t already have one of these micro-perforated colanders, get one. They’re absolutely incredible - they have such amazing flow so all the liquid just pours right through, but the smaller holes make it so that nothing sneaks through into your broth. I’ll put the link in the description for you.
Now once you’ve separated the all the liquid stock from the solids, let everything sit and cool for a minute. This is completely optional, but once all of the scraps have cooled enough to touch, you can remove any meat from the bones and lightly season it if it needs it. Then you can store it and add it back in if you want to make soup or gravy in the future.
Once the liquid has cooled a bit, you can start ladeling it into mason jars. Just be sure not to cap the jars until the liquid has fully cooled.
All right, now that I’ve given this turkey stock a little bit of a chance to cool, I can finally taste it without burning my mouth so let’s see how it turned out.
Mmm. That’s really good. The seasoning is actually spot on. I don’t have to add any more salt. It’s actually really peppery - it’s got a really nice spice to it which actually compliments the gaminess of the turkey really nicely. It’s going to make a great foundation for the gravy that we’ll make in the next video.
But if you don’t like that much spice, maybe dial down the amount of pepper that we used when you try it for yourself.
All right guys, well that’s going to do it for us this time. If you liked this video, go ahead and smash that like button - it really helps us out and if you’re interested in watching us make our totally keto friendly gluten free turkey gravy that will go perfect with your Thanksgiving meal, make sure you hit that subscribe button so that you don’t miss out on that video when it comes out