Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

This same discussion came up during Thanksgiving, when I was using the Crock Pot for 2 days making stock from the turkey bones, and what the cost would actually be. I've wondered this since.

According to Chowhound (http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/466752), it should cost $.10-.30 for 8 hours to run a crock pot, which brings the total for 2 days to no more than $1.80 for 2 very concentrated pints of stock (reduced from 4Q), which is roughly the price of 2 cans of College Inn Chicken stock which hasn't been concentrated (and mine lacks MSG, sugar, hydrolyzed/hydrogenated whatevers...). The bones are leftovers, and we had sea salt in the pantry. So the cost remained ~$1/ pint of super-concentrated stock/glace.

I do the same with chicken bones after a roast, sometimes with 1 carcass, other times 2. Deboning the bird after dinner and putting them into a Crock Pot is so much less effort than attempting to put the bone-in roast into the refrigerator (very few containers/bags/foil hold a whole bird, even partially consumed, and wrapping those in foil dries out the meat while ziplock bags don't look that appetizing). It takes me no more than 5 minutes to debone a cooled, cooked bird, and I leave the crock pot afterwards. Add in a few minutes to funnel the stock and clean the dishes, move the jars to a cooling spot before refrigerating them, take the bones to the trash can outside...and AT MOST, I've spent a total of 20-30 minutes actively preparing the stock and cleaning containers by hand.

If I were to add in the cost of the meat which is not in the stock, it would be $7/7lb bird, so the total would then come to $8.80 including time in the pot, but I'd likely have twice as much concentrated stock, at $2.20/pint. Organic might bring the cost to $5/pint (using whole birds, not just bones), but even that is cheaper than the environmental cost of transporting cans and boxes of liquids from plant to store in addition to the cost of driving (or even walking) to the store to pick up said stock, recycling the containers, etc.

Added bonus: the house smells nice and the pets are crazier.