Bone Broth!

Stock. Bone broth. Soup. Whatever you call it, it's delicious, full of nutrients and minerals, and damn easy to make. I made my first bone broth a few weekends ago but did not document it in case it turned out to be a terrible disaster - it wasn't! It was pretty good in fact.  I made note of a few things to alter made my second batch this weekend. The first broth I made was from a rotisserie chicken carcass. I did the same this time, but I also included some leftover porkchop bones and bought some beef neck (sorry dad) soup bones and roasted them in the oven for about an hour at 400 degrees before starting the stock. The joints and cartilage-heavy bones really add to the gelatin in a good stock. Gelatin seriously lacks from the standard American diet since we don't eat whole animals anymore, broth helps replenish it (also it's good for your skin!). Before I get into the how-to, I really recommend this website: http://www.jadeinstitute.com/jade/bone-broth-health-building.php, while I used a number of resources to learn how to make a good stock, this is the one I keep going back to. It also has a nice history and breakdown of the health benefits.

 





















 You want to make sure you break open the bones before putting them in your crock-pot. It allows the marrow and other goodness to be absorbed into the water.

 Soooo once you've roasted the bones and cracked them open just throw them in a crock-pot! I added an onion (with skin), a head of garlic (chopped in half lengthwise and with skin), and some herbs - I think rosemary, basil, thyme, ginger, pretty much whatever else I had laying around that seemed to work well. Cover it with water, turn it on low, and let it cook away. Seriously, that's it. Just leave it a lone for a long amount of time. This time I let it go for ~9 hours.

 

It will end up looking something like this:

Strain it out and put it in some containers. I just used a colander so some of the herbs made it through to the broth, but I don't really mind. I put 2/3 in tupperware and then it went straight into the freezer; the broth I'll be using this week went in an old pickle jar and in the fridge.

These results were great. I got a much richer color, likely due to the pork and beef bones in addition to the chicken. Also, once cooled, the broth developed a thick layer of fat on top. This sounds gross, I know, but it's a good sign that it really absorbed as much as it could out of the bones. It scrapes off very easily with a spoon and you can just discard it in the trash. Delicious broth for drinking, sauteing vegetables in, and really using wherever you would normally use water.