About $150 a year if you make a batch every two weeks — that’s the difference between buying decent boxed stock and making it from bones and vegetable scraps you’d otherwise throw away. A 6-quart pot of homemade chicken stock costs roughly $0 in incremental ingredients. The store-bought equivalent runs $3 a quart for boxed broth, or $6 a quart if you want something that actually tastes like chicken.

This isn’t about whether homemade stock tastes better — it does. This is about whether the time investment makes sense for your household, what scraps are worth saving, and the one technique detail that separates weak broth from stock that gels when cold.

What to save

Keep a gallon freezer bag in your freezer. Toss in chicken bones (raw or cooked), vegetable trimmings, herb stems, and parmesan rinds as you accumulate them. When the bag is full, you have enough for a batch.

Chicken and turkey carcasses are the backbone of poultry stock — a rotisserie chicken carcass alone gives you enough for 4 quarts. Beef bones work if you eat beef. Vegetable scraps that work: onion skins and ends, carrot peels and tops, celery leaves and ends, leek greens, parsley stems, thyme stems, mushroom stems, garlic skins, fennel fronds, tomato cores.

Parmesan rinds add umami to vegetable or chicken stock. One rind per 6-quart batch. They don’t dissolve — fish them out before straining.

What not to save

No brassicas. Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and kale turn stock bitter and sulfurous. No bell pepper cores — they add a tinny sweetness that doesn’t belong. No starchy vegetable peels like potato or sweet potato — they make stock cloudy and add an off flavor.

No fish bones unless you’re specifically making fish stock, which requires a different technique (20 minutes max simmer time, not hours). Citrus peels are debatable — a small strip of lemon peel is fine, but a whole lemon’s worth will make your stock taste like furniture polish.

Avoid anything moldy or slimy, obviously. Freezing pauses decay but doesn’t reverse it.

The technique that matters

For chicken or beef stock: roast the bones first. Spread them on a sheet pan, 425°F for 30-40 minutes until browned. This adds color and depth. Skip this and your stock will be pale and taste like hot water with a vague poultry suggestion.

For vegetable stock: use raw scraps. Roasting vegetables concentrates their sugars, which can make vegetable stock too sweet.

Once bones are roasted (or scraps are ready), put everything in your largest pot. Cover with cold water by 2 inches. Bring to a bare simmer — not a rolling boil. Boiling makes stock cloudy and can extract bitter compounds from bones. Simmer for 3-4 hours for chicken, 6-8 for beef, 1-2 for vegetable. Skim any foam that rises in the first 30 minutes.

Strain through a fine-mesh strainer or cheesecloth. Let cool, then refrigerate. Fat will solidify on top — scrape it off or leave it as a seal if you’re storing in the fridge for a few days. Good stock gels when cold because of collagen extracted from bones and connective tissue. If it doesn’t gel, it’s still usable, just weaker.

The labor calculation

Active time: 20 minutes. Roast bones, dump everything in a pot, strain at the end. Passive time: 3-4 hours while it simmers. You need to be home, but you don’t need to do anything. It’s a weekend morning task or a work-from-home day background activity.

A 6-quart batch yields roughly 5 quarts of finished stock after evaporation and straining. Boxed stock costs $3 per quart for brands like Pacific or Swanson. Better stock from places like Bonafide or Kettle & Fire runs $6 per quart. Your scrap stock costs $0 in ingredients, plus maybe $0.15 in gas or electricity to run the stove for 4 hours.

If you make a batch every two weeks: 26 batches a year, 130 quarts. At $3 per quart for the boxed stuff, that’s $390 saved. At $6 per quart, $780 saved. Realistic for most households is somewhere in between — maybe you buy stock sometimes and make it sometimes. Call it $150-200 a year if you make one batch a month.

A note on the math

This assumes you’re already buying and cooking whole chickens or rotisserie chickens, and already peeling vegetables. If you start buying chicken specifically for the bones, the math flips — bone-in chicken parts cost $2-3 per pound, and you’d need 2-3 pounds for a good batch.

The freezer bag method only works if you have freezer space and remember to save scraps. If you forget and throw things away half the time, cut the annual savings in half.

Storage matters too. Stock keeps 4-5 days in the fridge, 4-6 months in the freezer. Freeze in 2-cup portions (a quart bag filled halfway) so you can thaw exactly what you need. If you make a big batch and it goes bad before you use it, you’ve saved nothing.

The real question is whether 20 minutes of active work every couple weeks is worth $12-15 to you. For most home cooks who already make soup, risotto, or braises regularly, it is. If you rarely cook with stock, buying a box when you need it makes more sense than maintaining a scrap bag and dedicating half a Saturday to simmering bones.