For sure and for certain .25/ounce is a high price. But I'm concerned about your total production. Six cups doesn't sound like much, and, perhaps, you cooked it down too far?
I feel almost certain that this is what I did, but I'm not sure what I'd do differently, given the same ingredients and equipment. I am working in an 8 qt. pot, and once the ingredients were in, there just wasn't that much room left in the pot. I am under the impression that an important part of preparing stock is allowing the liquid to cook down some and concentrate (the flavor and the texture), and once I let the liquid reduce a bit, this is what I was left with. I think that at one point I had about 3 qts. of liquid in the pot, but I didn't feel all that comfortable adding more (I was withing about 1" of the top, and just didn't want to make a horrifying mess).
I let the stock reduce until the flavor was significant, tasting along with a very tiny pinch of salt, as I didn't use any salt in the stock itself. The final result, after cooling approx. 8 hours in the fridge, has a substantial body of taste, and after 8 hours has the texture of 3/4 set Jell-O. I'm thinking that perhaps what I have now is 48 fl. oz. of highly reduced stock, which I can perhaps bring to a boil with a quantity of water to bring up my effective yield. The problem then is that I think I'll lose most of the flavor.
This is just extra frustrating because I'm used to getting 3-3 1/2 qts. of very flavorful
chicken stock out of $10 of
chicken and the exact same pot.
I'm not sure what the solution is. In a perfect world, I would would be using a much larger pot and a higher initial volume of water, and I think I could substantially boost the flavor by using a remouillage (rather than water) to start the stock and by adding a bit of actual
beef to the party. The goal would be a 1 gallon yield from 8lbs of
beef product (as given in "The Professional Chef"). That volume of yield would (for me) justify the cost and the time, but getting approx. one third of that is sort of a bummer.
My goal, in addition to having a couple of quarts of stock available as a soup base, would be to have a quart of Demi-Glace, Glace de Viande, and/or Sauce Espagnole in the freezer and ready to be utilized spoon-by-spoon in making two-person quantities of sauce. Eventually, I'd like to have the same thing set up with a quart of frozen velouté. While my stock production method for white
chicken stock is certainly sustainable, I remain skeptical of my brown stock pipeline.
And, as always, thanks to everyone for their support.