Where to Buy Chicken Stock: A Guide to Finding the Best Chicken Stock for Cooking

Lesley Stockton is a writer focused on kitchen and entertaining. Her coverage includes grilling, kitchen knives, and cookware, just to name a few.

One of our choices, Good Were looking into whether its been discontinued. Meanwhile, we stand by our remaining picks.

A good-tasting chicken broth can help ensure a better result in your cooking, even when broth is just a bit player in a recipe. And when broth is the star ingredient, as it is in soup, it can make or break the final dish.

But store-bought chicken broths range widely in quality and flavor. And if you’re staring at an aisle’s worth of options in the supermarket, deciding which one is the best can be daunting: Labels and ingredient lists can tell you only so much, and a higher price doesn’t necessarily translate to better flavor.

We tasted and ranked 15 nationally available chicken broths and stocks with less than 150 milligrams of sodium per serving. We chose low-sodium kinds because you can always add salt to food, but you can’t take it away. The broths ranged in flavor from insipid to full-bodied, and some of the ones we tasted had strong off-flavors, like burnt onion, or had a mysterious acidic tang. The broths that ranked the highest smelled and tasted the most like a bowl of chicken soup.

Also, quality aside, a broth may be good for some recipes and not others. For example, a more robustly flavored chicken broth adds welcome richness to stuffings, braises, and hearty stews, but it’s probably too heavy for a bright spring vegetable dish. We noted the applications we thought were best for the broths that reached the top of our list.

Of all the broths we tried, the Target house brand has the truest, most robust chicken flavor. We’re confident that this is an excellent all-purpose broth for any braise, soup, or side dish (like rice pilaf). Winnie Yang, a former editor of the Wirecutter and one of my tasters, gave the Good She wrote in her notes that it smelled and tasted “like something I could have made from a skinned chicken carcass.” ” It’s luscious and full-bodied, with a dominant deep roasty flavor. Good & Gather’s chicken-y assertiveness might taste too pungent for some folks, though. If you’re looking for a lighter and brighter alternative, the Imagine Organic Free Range Chicken Broth is a great choice.

A classic stock that tastes clean and bright, and won’t overpower other ingredients in your recipes.

You won’t get in-your-face, intense roasted-meat goodness from this broth, but we really liked its clean and subtle chicken flavor, as well as its aroma, which, quite frankly, reminded us of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup (no shade). At first taste, the Imagine broth, when it was piping hot, delivered more intense aroma than flavor; it wasn’t until the broth cooled a bit that we could detect more chicken on the palate. The Imagine broth made a comforting bowl of soup, and the chicken flavor became more pronounced after it reduced a bit from boiling with egg noodles and Napa cabbage. The addition of lemon juice did, however, overpower this broth a bit. That said, we think this is a solid all-purpose broth that’s ideal for braises, poached fish, sauces, soups—really, any application where you want to add a little extra flavor while letting the other ingredients shine.

It kind of blew our minds that Target’s chicken stock was one of our favorites yet also cost the least of all the competition. It isn’t nearly as rich as the Good & Gather bone broth, but it is more robust than the Imagine broth. The Good & Gather stock tastes the most vegetal of our three top picks, due to the organic vegetable flavor and cabbage juice concentrate in the ingredients list. It made a fine bowl of simple noodle soup. However, I think this stock is better suited for recipes in which it isn’t the main ingredient, such as meat braises and stuffing. One thing to note is that this broth has 1 gram of added sugars per serving; it doesn’t impact the flavor much, but folks who are concerned about their sugar intake should keep that in mind.

Other good chicken broths

If you want a lighter bone broth with greater ingredients transparency: Pacific Foods Organic Bone Broth Chicken Unsalted (about $5. 50 per quart) is a respectable runner-up to the Good & Gather bone broth. This bone broth has less body and chicken flavor than the other one. It also has more vegetables, herbs, and spices than the other one. The Pacific Foods bone broth also stands apart from the competition in that the label fully spells out the ingredients, listing water, organic chicken, organic vegetables (onions, carrots, celery), and so on. On most of the broths and stocks we tasted, the labels listed only “chicken broth” or “chicken stock” as the first ingredient. The Pacific Foods bone broth works well in a lot of different recipes. It would even make a great soup base with some extra carrots, onions, and fresh herbs.

For a decent and economical supermarket option: The College Inn Unsalted Chicken Stock (about $2. 60 per quart) is a solid choice. It got different grades from the testers: I thought it was okay, and Winnie ranked it as her number-two pick. In her notes, Winnie wrote that this stock had “decent chicken flavor” that was “pleasant and clean. ” She also found it “surprisingly rich” given the “fairly clear straw color. ” I put the College Inn Unsalted Chicken Stock squarely in the middle.

For a supermarket brand with more intense, chicken-y flavor: Swanson Unsalted Chicken Cooking Stock (about $3. 20 per quart) is inoffensive and was available at most of the supermarkets I shopped at while researching this guide. Winnie and I were split on the flavors we picked up in this one—she detected a charred onion flavor, whereas I thought it had a pleasant bit of gaminess, like a stock made from a more mature chicken. We think it’s one of the better-tasting store-bought chicken stocks that most people can find at the store.

This is not a comprehensive list of everything we tested in previous iterations of this guide, just what’s still available.

Swanson Organic Low-Sodium Free-Range Chicken Broth (about $4 per quart) doesn’t taste terrible so much as it doesn’t taste like much of anything. Even though this broth had a “cleaner” flavor than most of the others we dismissed, it was insipid, thin, and described as “weaksauce” by our blind-taster.

The Pacific Foods Organic Free Range Chicken Broth Low Sodium (about $3.30 per quart) was too weak on chicken flavor and aroma for the price. An onion-powder flavor, while not overtly offensive, dominated and lingered on the palate.

Target’s Good & Gather Organic No Salt Added Chicken Broth (about $2 per quart) is very affordable for an organic product, and we think we know why: In our tests it was watery and barely tasted like anything, chicken or otherwise. If buying organic is a priority, you’re better off spending slightly more for a quart of the Imagine organic low-sodium broth.

“Milky white” and “bland” best describe Whole Foods 365 Organic Chicken Broth Low Sodium (about $2.50 per quart).This broth stood out for its lack of both flavor and color. We detected a faint chicken aroma, and that’s about it.

To paraphrase Winnie, our blind-taster, the Progresso Chicken Broth Unsalted (about $2.70 per quart) tasted like the plastic from the carton more than anything else. I also thought this one was plasticky, with a strong onion-powder and yeast aftertaste.

Intense onion flavor dominated Swanson Unsalted Chicken Broth (about $2.50 per quart). The chicken flavor was there, but the yeast extract in the ingredients took over and lingered on the palate for a while. If Swanson broths and stocks are the best option at your local supermarket, skip this one and grab either the Unsalted Chicken Cooking Stock or the Organic Low-Sodium Free Range Chicken Broth.

I don’t like to drag subpar products through the mud, but the Rachael Ray Stock-in-a-Box Low-Sodium Chicken Stock (about $3.00 per quart) was one of the worst we tasted. It had no discernible chicken flavor or aroma. Instead, it was watery and plasticky tasting, with an unidentifiable off-flavor that lingered way too long on the palate. The Rachael Ray stock is the only one we tested that’s made from watered-down chicken stock concentrate, not chicken stock or broth. And the difference was glaringly obvious.

We don’t know which ingredient made Kitchen Basics Unsalted Chicken Stock (about $3.30 per quart) taste so sour. The only clue we could gather from the ingredient list was “natural flavor.” In our tasting notes, we agreed that the strong acidic flavor was the most memorable characteristic. Winnie called it “thin” and mused that it “might be worse” than the Rachael Ray stock.

The Best and Worst Supermarket Chicken Broths | The Taste Test

FAQ

Can you buy real chicken stock?

Handmade Chicken Stock 500ml Our homemade chicken stock is the perfect base of any soup and has great nutritional value. Our chicken bone broth is made by slowly simmering chicken carcasses and chicken necks, with thyme, garlic and seasoning. Please note, this product requires 48 hours notice.

Can you buy chicken stock in a grocery store?

You can purchase Kitchen Basics Chicken Stock online or in most nationwide grocery stores.

Is chicken broth and chicken stock the same thing?

No, chicken broth and chicken stock are not exactly the same, though they are often used interchangeably. While both are flavorful liquids made from simmering chicken and vegetables, the key difference lies in their foundation: stock is typically made from bones, while broth is made from meat.

Can you purchase chicken broth?

A good-tasting chicken broth can help ensure a better result in your cooking, even when broth is just a bit player in a recipe. And when broth is the main thing in a dish, like in soup, it can make or break it. But store-bought chicken broths range widely in quality and flavor.