This is the equipment needed. It's also a good idea to also have a strainer/sieve and some containers to store the liquid stock in the fridge.

You need a pretty large pot for this. You could also use a slow cooker, though the one I have isn't really large enough for a whole chicken.

This is the chicken I've been using. These are available in Australia in most ordinary supermarkets, and they are not expensive. Expect to pay around $10-12 for one of these. Its more healthy if you can use meat that hasn't been raised full of chemicals and drugs.

Put the chicken in the pot and add water and salt. Then you are ready to cook it. Cooking doesn't get much easier than this.

Fill it to about halfway between the top of the chicken and the top of the pot. It doesn't have to be exact. You could also add vegetables to make it into chicken soup rather than stock.

Put it on the stove and turn on high till boiling, then turn down to a simmer (which means a very slow boil so that its only just bubbling). On my small low-power stove it takes 20 minutes on high (number 6 out of 6 on the dial) to boil, and then simmers well on the half power setting (3 out of 6).

When its done, take off the stove and strain some of it into another container (like a saucepan). The stock can be drunk like a cup of tea. It tastes kind of like a cup-a-soup but about 100,000 times more healthy.

The chicken itself will fall apart and can be eaten for a meal.

When it is cool enough transfer to glass jars and keep in the fridge. Then you can boil it up again in a saucepan and keep drinking it over a week. It keeps for up to a week like this in the fridge.

Under the plate is a bowl with the remains of the chicken that I didn't eat all at once. More on this below...

This is all that was left after eating about 1/3 of the chicken. The larger bones were the only thing not soft enough to eat.

It's hard to see on this photo but this is is one of the two sternum bones of the chicken, soft enough for the fork to go right through it as if it was part of the meat.

You can eat the spinal column, here is one of the vertebrae. These go really soft, after 8 hours they aren't crunchy at all.

This was the remains after another 1/3 of the chicken was consumed the following day.

After a few meals of eating meat and bones, I discovered that the ends of the long bones are also quite soft and you can get to the marrow. The middle of the shafts was still too hard to eat. See the warning above about eating hard bones. If you boiled the chicken for longer than 8 hours, these would also become soft.

This is all that was left of the final 1/3 of the chicken.

The three photos here of plates with bones left on the plate, added together, represent everything that I didn't eat of the chicken in the photo at the top of the page.

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