My favorite taquitos recipe suggests just using rotisserie chicken instead of making your own, and having done it both ways I have to agree that there is just something about the taquitos made from a rotisserie chicken that can not be beat. So last time it was Taquito Time, we decided to load up with THREE rotisserie chickens and go on a madcap adventure across multiple meals.
Stage One: Taquitos
This is one of our favorite foods to bulk prepare. The Our Best Bites recipe is so easy to scale up. In fact, it’s honestly easier to make a big batch because then you can make the most of ingredients like the green onions and green salsa instead of buying more than you can use. We tend to get cream cheese and pepperjack cheese in bulk from Sam’s which makes it even more affordable to make a lot at once. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot.
(Please ignore the fact that I did half of this while sitting at my craft table so I could watch TV. I can not express fully how chaotic I am!)
After you’ve mixed up the taquito mix, you can roll your taquitos up (I just do it carefully and stack them up seam side down). I like to flash freeze mine at this point, because the one time I tried to vacuum seal them without doing that I found out that if you squeeze thawed taquitos in a vacuum they all join together into one Mega Frozen Taquito that you could not break apart with a hammer.
And we bake these from frozen! That is what makes them one of our favorites. You can just grab some from the freezer, toss them on a cookie sheet, throw on some salt and a little spritz of oil, and bake for ~25 minutes and they taste fresh and perfect. I vacuum seal ours in packs of 8, which works great for us for a dinner.
Stage Two: Chicken Stock!
Once we had all those chicken carcasses, we had to do something with them. Normally I would just throw them away, but fortunately I married a guy who likes to do fancy things like make homemade stock. And man, it is worth it.
His recipe is mostly vibes in which he throws a bunch of vegetables and fresh herbs into the pot with a ton of water and then lets it simmer like it is going out of style. It smells good and is incredibly pretty!
This is where we break out the Souper Cubes most of the time. Freezing them in two cup portions is pretty versatile. It is super easy to just toss one or two of these into a pot and let it heat up and then make soup with it! One of my new favorites to make with my stock is Egg Drop Soup, and this recipe is super accessible and super delicious!
But eventually our freezer does get pretty full, so I decided it was time to veer into Freeze Dryer land and do a new madcap experiement.
Stage Three: Freeze-Dried Stock Powder
Yep. You can freeze dry chicken stock. A lot of the big freeze drying content creators actually swear by it, because it is incredibly easy to store, takes up very little space, and they swear it is 1000x better than the bouillon you could buy at the store. Mostly I needed to free up some freezer space, so very nervously, I did the math to see how much I could fit in my trays. The answer: 12 cups. And man, does that take up less space as powder or what?
But way back at the beginning, when I pulled the meat off of three different chickens? I ended up with a little too much meat for my taquitos. So what was I going to do with the extra?
Keep freeze drying.
Stage Four: Freeze Dried Chicken
Yep. You can freeze dry rotisserie chicken. Best practices are to pull off the skin and keep an eye on how much fat it has, as fat does not freeze dry well and will limit how shelf stable your end product will be. (But in freeze drying, “limit” can often mean a year or two instead of twenty.)
I patted my chicken down and popped it into the dryer, and it came out delightfully dry and ready to go in jars. I’m planning on using this next time I want some easy chicken soup! Take my powder and my chicken and just add water, I guess??? (Maybe I need some soup packets like my egg packets!)
Speaking of eggs, I guess now I have a shelf that is basically Chicken Themed. I will have to come back once I’ve made soup and let folks know how it went!
