Bone broth is one of the most healing foods you can eat and is critical for restoring gut health. It's full of nutrient rich vitamins, minerals, glycine, gelatin that are healing for our digestive tract, easy to digest, and absolutely delicious.
It's stupid expensive buying it from the store & not of a proper quality. It's fun and easy to make at home too! I make this in big batches and then freeze the extra jars. We go through gallons and gallons of this every year. Shoulder-free glass jars are the best for freezing. You'll need to leave a couple of inches of air space at the top for expansion.
You can make a basic soup stock or a more flavorful sipping broth. With the basic soup broth I don't typically add as many flavorful herbs when making it - I'll add those when I'm actually making the soup depending on what I'm making.
Step One: Gather Your Ingredients
You'll Need:
- Bones from Pasture-raised meats
- Salt & Pepper
- Apple Cider Vinegar
- Water
- Optional but Recommended:
- seaweed
- medicinal herbs
- garlic & onion
THE BONES
Ideally, you want to source an array of bones, not just the marrow bones. You can ask your butcher or farmer for a wider variety. This can include rib bones, knuckles, flat bones like scapula, etc. Chicken feet are also a great option to add into the mix. If you can only access marrow bones - that's okay! That type of broth is better than none at all.
Sourcing is important here, and it's best to get these directly from a farmer or local butcher. They're going to be of a higher quality and better nutrition than the marrow bones you'll find at a standard grocery store. Again, I feel that some bone broth is better than none at all - but the difference in quality between sourcing from your local farmer compared to a standard grocery store is significant.
From Tara Couture, of Slowdown Farmstead:
"The quality of your ingredients matters. Any heavy metals and contaminants are nicely tucked away in the bones and the fat of animals (us, too). I can’t think of a worse thing to do than boil that down for hours, condensing those toxins. Grass fed and finished animals raised on organic feed (in the case of non-ruminants) or wild animals from clean areas (you don’t want to eat wild game that has fattened on glyphosate/gmo corn for most of its life) are what you’re after.
Good water is essential for the same reason healthy animals are. You don’t want fluoride and pharmaceutical residues concentrated in what should be a nourishing food."
Step Two: Roast the Bones
Place bones in oven on a lined baking sheet and roast at 425 until they're beginning to turn brown & bubbly. This will enhance the flavor of your broth.
At this point, you can scoop out the roasted marrow from the marrow bones if you'd like to set it aside & use later - or eat now! I typically leave it and it goes into the broth.
If you want to use garlic & onion in your broth to enhance the flavor - you can roughly chop them up and put on the pan when roasting also, or just add them into the broth raw.
Step Three: Everything Into the Pot
Place the roasted bones into your big pot and fill it up with high-quality water. You'll add a handful of salt, handful of pepper, and a few glugs of vinegar. i use a raw apple cider vinegar. This helps to pull minerals from the bones and adds flavor.
These ingredients are all the foundational part of your basic bone broth - and you can add in flavor & medicinal herbs from here. I like to add in a handful of seaweed, some dried birch polypore mushrooms, garlic, onion, a few bay leaves, and some rosemary/thyme/sage/parsley - whatever I have on hand. You can add nettles, dandelion or burdock root also, customizable for what you have on hand!
Then you're going to slowly simmer on a very low heat for 24-48 hours. I'll leave it on the stove all day, shut it off at night & start again the next day. You want a very slow bubble. The meat will fall off the bones and the marrow will come out and melt into the broth. Some water will evaporate, and your remaining product should be very thick and gelatinous when cooled.
You can skim off the extra fat for your animals or to cook with, or just leave it in! The final product should have a nice jiggle to it when put in the fridge.
Then you can pour into glass jars and keep in the fridge/freezer. I'll use half gallon jars to pull out for making soup and quart jars for just sipping on. This is the most nourishing, easy-to-digest, healing food for restoring gut health. It was a critical part of our ancestors diet & is especially needed in our modern lives today.
If this interests you, and you want to learn more about bone-broth, ancestral foods, cooking, and natural living, I'd recommend checking out Slowdown Farmstead. Tara Couture is a mentor of mine, a brilliant writer, farmer, and wise woman sharing her knowledge and skills with us. You can check out her website or IG for more information.