make a large batch of stock), or find them in most supermarkets at a bargain rate But wings will do just fine if you can’t get your hands on carcasses So we now know that for the optimum broth, we need two things: extraction of flavorful compounds from within muscle fibers (as indicated by the broths produced from chicken meat) and the extraction of gelatin from connective tissue to provide body The question is, is there any way to speed things up a bit? Well, I knew that chicken muscles look like long, thin tubes, and that extracting flavor from them is about slowly cooking them to extract their contents, much like squeezing a toothpaste tube The degree to which those tubes are squeezed is dependent upon the temperature to which the chicken is brought, but the rate at which those flavors come out is also dependent upon the distance they have to travel from the interior of the muscles to the stock So, I wondered, would shortening the length of those tubes hasten the flavor extraction process? I cooked three stocks side by side using chicken carcasses chopped to different degrees and found that indeed it does make a difference Chopped carcasses gave up their flavor far faster than whole carcasses, and throwing roughly chopped chicken pieces into the food processor and finely grinding them worked even faster, producing a full-flavored broth in just about 45 minutes It ain’t pretty, but hey, it works! Roughly chopped