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With rising food costs and grocery shortages, now is the perfect time to preserve kitchen staples like chicken broth. This easy chicken broth canning recipe creates rich, flavorful stock you can use year-round. Safely pressure can it to keep your pantry stocked with homemade comfort in every jar.
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By Diane Devereaux | The Canning Diva®
Last updated: October 8, 2025
Key Takeaways
- Simple, wholesome ingredients create a versatile base for soups and sauces.
- Use a whole chicken or poultry parts—nothing goes to waste.
- Pressure canning ensures a safe, shelf-stable broth ready anytime.
A Pantry Staple with Centuries of Tradition
Chicken broth has been a kitchen essential for generations, valued as both a comfort food and a culinary base. Across cultures—from French kitchens perfecting velouté sauces to traditional Asian soups simmered with herbs—chicken broth has always been a symbol of home-cooked nourishment. It was a way to stretch a single chicken into multiple meals, ensuring no part of the bird went to waste.
In the early 1900s, before commercial bouillon cubes and boxed broth, home cooks relied on slow-simmered stock to flavor stews, gravies, and vegetables. When pressure canning became accessible to households, families could finally preserve their homemade broth safely for year-round use. This easy chicken broth canning recipe keeps that heritage alive, allowing today’s home canners to stock their pantry shelves with wholesome, flavorful broth made entirely from scratch.
Homemade chicken broth is lower in sodium and free from artificial ingredients found in many store-bought versions. By controlling your ingredients, you can tailor the flavor to your cooking style—light and aromatic for soups, or rich and savory for casseroles and sauces. Beyond soups, try using your canned chicken broth to cook rice, couscous, or quinoa; the subtle flavor makes grains taste more satisfying and elevates even the simplest dishes.
Canning chicken broth is more than a preservation method—it’s an act of self-reliance and care. A few jars on the shelf mean comfort, flavor, and nourishment are always within reach, ready to support your family’s meals no matter what the grocery shelves look like.
Easy Chicken Broth Canning Recipe
This easy chicken broth canning recipe creates a flavorful, homemade broth perfect for soups, sauces, and grains. Made from simple ingredients and preserved in a pressure canner, it’s a timeless pantry staple you can rely on year-round.
Yield: Approx. 7 quarts or 14 pints
Ingredients
- 9 quarts water (36 cups)
- 1 whole chicken (2 to 4 pounds) or leg quarters
- 4 yellow onions, peeled and quartered
- 10 whole garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
- 1 tablespoon dried thyme
- 2 teaspoons coarse sea salt (optional)
- 5 carrots, peeled and chopped in half
- 4 celery stalks, chopped in half
- 2-3 bay leaves
- 2 tablespoons dried parsley flakes
- 1 tablespoon dried oregano
- 1 tablespoon black peppercorns
Instructions
- In a large stockpot add water, chicken pieces, onions, garlic, thyme, salt, carrots, celery, bay leaves, parsley, oregano and peppercorns. Mix well to distribute ingredients.
- Starting on medium heat, bring stock pot to a boil. Increase to medium-high heat and gently boil for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Reduce heat and simmer, undisturbed and uncovered, for 1 hour. For a richer broth, simmer for 3 hours.
- Using a slotted spoon, remove meat, vegetables and herbs from stock pot. Meat may be used to make soup or stew, but discard bones, vegetables and herbs. Pour stock through a fine-mesh chinois strainer, or sieve, capturing strained broth in a large, clean stock pot.
- Ladle hot strained broth into hot jars leaving 1-inch headspace. Wipe each rim with a wash cloth dipped in vinegar. Place a lid and ring on each jar and hand tighten.
- Process in a pressure canner at 10 PSI or according to your elevation and canner type. Process quarts for 25 minutes and pints for 20 minutes.
Ingredient Tip: While chicken broth is the most common, feel free to substitute a whole turkey, pheasant, or two male Cornish game hens. Have chicken pieces and parts in the freezer? Perfect. You may use 4 large chicken breasts with rib meat, being sure to keep the skin on. After boiling the recipe, you may debone the breasts and use the meat in a meal.
Yield Tip: Broth volume reduces as it simmers uncovered—typically by 35–50%. For a richer flavor and more concentrated flavor, plan for a 3 hour simmer to yield 7 quarts of strained broth. With a 1 hour simmer, this recipe will yield about 9 quarts of strained broth after reduction.
People Often Ask
A: Yes! Roasting the chicken and vegetables first creates a darker, more robust broth. It’s a great option if you prefer deeper flavor or plan to use the broth in hearty soups and sauces.
A: Absolutely. Skin-on poultry adds more flavor and fat to the broth, but skinless chicken works just as well if you prefer a lighter, lower-fat option.
A: This chicken broth recipe uses meat and vegetables simmered for a shorter time, creating a light, aromatic flavor. Bone stock is simmered much longer to extract collagen and minerals from the bones for a richer, more gelatinous result.
About the Author:
Diane Devereaux, The Canning Diva®, is an internationally recognized food preservation expert, author, and educator with over 30 years of home canning experience. She’s the author of multiple top-selling canning books and teaches workshops across the U.S. Learn more at TheCanningDiva.com.