One of the things we love about real food is that very little needs to go to waste.

We recently came across a brilliant idea from the team at Additive Free Lifestyle that got us thinking about just how far you can stretch one good quality chicken.

Most of us look at a whole chicken and think: dinner.

But with a little planning, that same chicken can give you a beautiful family meal, nourishing chicken bone broth AND homemade chicken stock powder or chicken salt.

That means more value from food you've already paid for, less waste going into the bin and fewer things you need to buy separately.

And the best bit? The second and third products are made largely from things you'd normally throw away.

1. First, enjoy your chicken

Start with a good quality whole chicken and cook it however your family loves it.

Roast it with potatoes and seasonal vegetables, cook it in the slow cooker, pop it on the BBQ or keep it really simple with olive oil, garlic, lemon and herbs.

Our regenerative farmed whole chickens are around $30, and depending on the size of your family, you may get dinner plus enough leftover meat for sandwiches, wraps, salads or lunches the next day.

But when dinner is finished, don't throw away the carcass.

Keep all the bones, skin, little bits of meat and juices. If you're not ready to do anything with them straight away, simply freeze the lot until you are.

That's where your $30 chicken starts becoming something much more valuable.

2. Turn the bones into chicken broth

Here's another little waste-saving habit we love: keep a container in the freezer for suitable veggie scraps.

Carrot ends, broccoli and cauliflower stalks, celery leaves and stalks, spring onion ends and other useful vegetable offcuts can be saved instead of going straight into the bin.

When you've got a good collection, it's broth time.

Add your chicken carcass and veggie scraps to a slow cooker with:

2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
Salt and pepper
At least 1.5 litres of water

You can also add fresh ginger, turmeric or herbs such as thyme, rosemary or bay leaves.

Cook on low for at least 8 hours, then strain the liquid.

And suddenly, what looked like a pile of scraps has become around 1.5 litres of beautiful homemade chicken broth.

Freeze it in smaller portions and use it for soups, curries, risottos, casseroles, sauces, gravy or homemade noodles.

But before you throw away everything you've strained out...

We're going to get one more thing from our chicken.

3. Turn what's left into stock powder or chicken salt

This was the clever part that really caught our attention when Additive Free Lifestyle shared it.

After you've strained your broth, carefully remove every single bone from the remaining chicken and vegetable mixture.

Add the remaining meat and vegetables to a high speed blender and blitz until pureed.

Spread the mixture in a thin layer over dehydrator sheets, or onto baking paper if you're using your oven.

Dehydrate at around 70°C for 4 to 6 hours, or until it is completely dry and crisp. The time will vary depending on how wet your mixture is and how thinly you've spread it.

It's really important that it is completely dry before storing. Any remaining moisture can allow it to spoil.

Once it's thoroughly dried and crispy, blitz it again into a fine powder.

You've now made your own chicken stock powder from something you might otherwise have put in the bin.

Use it to add flavour to soups, casseroles, sauces, gravy and other savoury dishes.

Turn it into chicken salt

Want to take it one step further?

For approximately 1 cup of homemade chicken stock powder, add around 1 tablespoon of good quality salt and blitz together.

Taste it and add a little more salt if you'd like.

Then try it on homemade chips or roast potatoes.

Chicken salt made from... actual chicken. Who knew?!

Now let's talk about the cost

This is where we think this gets particularly interesting.

Good quality food isn't always cheap. One of the ways we can make buying better food work harder for our household budget is by getting as much value as possible from what we buy.

A regenerative farmed whole chicken from Joy costs around $30.

If you were to buy some of the things we've just made separately, you'd be looking at approximately:

Of course, this isn't quite as simple as saying your $30 chicken magically turns into $88.50 worth of food.

You'll add vegetables, salt, apple cider vinegar, herbs and use electricity to cook and dehydrate everything. Your homemade products may also differ in quantity and concentration from the ready-made versions.

But it does show just how valuable the bits we often throw away can be.

The chicken was bought for dinner anyway.

The bones were going in the bin.

The veggie scraps were probably going in the compost.

Instead, you've turned them into something genuinely useful and potentially saved yourself from buying broth and stock or chicken salt separately.

So your $30 chicken becomes...

• A family dinner
• Potential leftovers for another meal or lunches
• Around 1.5 litres of homemade chicken broth
• Homemade chicken stock powder or chicken salt

All while significantly reducing the amount of food you're throwing away.

It's such a simple example of something previous generations understood instinctively: good food is valuable, so use as much of it as you can.

Buying a regenerative farmed chicken might cost more upfront than buying the cheapest chicken you can find. But when you use the meat, save the bones, save your veggie scraps, make the broth and then even use what's left from that, the economics start to look quite different.

Less waste. More food. More value from every chicken.

Don't have time for ANY of this? 

We completely understand.

This is definitely one of those wonderful when you have the time kitchen projects.

If you've got kids to ferry around, work to do and approximately 47 other things on your list this weekend, don't feel remotely guilty about skipping the eight-hour broth and homemade chicken salt experiment.

You can buy organic bone broth and organic chicken stock paste from us, ready to go.

You'll still have good quality real food sitting in the pantry or freezer when you need it, without spending your Sunday tending to a slow cooker and dehydrator.

But if you do have the time, we really encourage you to try making your own at least once.

There's something incredibly satisfying about looking at dinner, broth in the freezer and homemade stock powder in the cupboard and realising that all three started with one chicken.

That's real food, used well.

A little credit where it's due

This article was inspired by the clever team at Additive Free Lifestyle, who shared the method for turning the leftover chicken and vegetables from broth making into homemade stock powder and chicken salt.

We loved the idea, particularly the waste-reducing side of it, and wanted to look at it through the Joy lens: how can we get more value from the beautiful food we buy while wasting less of it?

Thanks for the inspiration, Additive Free Lifestyle!