Welcome, Michael,

And thanks for the great suggestion. Dogs all over the country will be very grateful !!

Welcome, Jay
That sounds like quite a project! Very clever to think of the turkey fryer as a stockpot. I’ve never used one – the fryer, that is – and even in the now distant restaurant days was never dealing with 25 carcasses at a time. I’m sure the initial stock will come out great! A little less confident about the boiling down, which might take so long in a tall narrow pot that it affected flavor. You might want to divide the strained broth and not try to do it all at once.
Or you might not. Either way, I can’t wait to hear how it comes out and I’m sure I’m not alone. Good luck!

Hi there Tarah, and welcome!

Mea culpa for not being clearer that this is one of those “recipes” that’s really a process, not a formula. My response to Bethany’s comment is about the best I can do for equivalencies: ideally, one homemade equals one commercial ( if you don’t count the salt), but how many cubes you’ll get depends entirely on the size of the original batch and how strongly flavored it is. If you use all bones and leftovers, you don’t get as many cubes per gallon of starter-stock as you do if you add extra flavor with raw (or roasted) chicken parts.

Smart idea about the baby food! No problem using ice cube trays; in fact I don’t see why you couldn’t freeze the broth right in them. That would help minimize their bonding when stored together without individual wrapping. (One of the things I like about the wrap is that it lets me take out a cube and just put it on the counter when I’m assembling ingredients before starting to cook, but it certainly isn’t essential.) The one thing to look out for is cube size to liquid measurement; with cubes as small as these it’ll be extra important.

Answer is it all depends. I try to get it so 1 cube dissolved in 6-7 ounces of boiling water = 1 cup of broth, but the stock (and the extent it gets cooked down) vary a lot from batch to batch. So I keep each batch separate and go slight on the water with the first cube, just so I know, then take it from there. But I don’t really use the cubes to make broth that way very often. More commonly, I’ll make a soup with water and then add a few cubes to intensify it, or even more commonly, I’ll be making pan sauce; deglazing a roasting or frying pan with some combo of wine and water, then adding a cube to turn the result into gravy made with broth. Also of course the cubes are useful as seasoning agents with no dilution at all – in stir-fries for instance, along with a scrape of ginger, splashes of sherry and soy and some garlic and… well, you get the idea.

and I hope you enjoy your explorations! Nothing exact about the wide kettle — idea is simply to use a pan with a large surface area so the broth can reduce speedily; you could use a huge saute pan if it weren’t so awkward to pour liquid from. My favorite pan for this is a vintage enamel item that’s both capacious and quite strongly tapered. much wider at the top than the bottom; but I so seldom see this shape on cookware shelves I didn’t want to specify it and make people think it was needed. As for the bouillon cubes, “chicken flavored” does sound a bit suspect, but to me the real problem isn’t the ingredients in them so much as the sort-of-commercial taste they impose on whatever they’re used in.