Bone Broth
Bone Broth, as it has become colloquial known, is an amazing healthy superfood. It’s packed with vitamins, minerals, collagen, and gelatin making it fantastic for your skin, joints, gut, and immune system. Cook up a nice big pot today using our simple delicious recipe!
Stock vs Broth
We need to get something out of the way. Is bone broth actually a broth or is it a stock? The very fact that I asked the question in the first place should give you the answer. Despite being colloquially known as “bone broth,” this concoction of simmered bones is actually a stock. Why has bone broth adopted its new ubiquitous moniker? Probably because it sounds good. Bone broth flows off the tongue better than bone stock.
What’s the difference between a stock and a broth? A couple of things; cooking time, viscosity, and ingredients. Stocks tend to utilize collagen-rich bones and joints simmerings them for hours on end to breakdown and extract all the gelatinous collagen goodness. This results in a much thicker product than a broth. Broth tends to be much thinner utilizing meat sans bone for the flavor. The cook time is much less and it’s a lot less hassle. As much as it pains me to do so, I will refer to this concoction as bone broth for the rest of the article because that is what it has become to be known as.
Bone Broth is Nothing New
Despite the relatively recent attention and popularity for bone broth, it’s nothing new. Bone Broth has been produced ever since people decided eating their food in liquid was a good idea, i.e. soup. Humans back at the beginning of culinary history tossed bones, scraps, and vegetables in a pot of simmering water to extract every last bit of nutrition and sustenance they could out of what they had. That’s the way it’s been up through the millennia until relatively recently. In the modern age with the introduction of pre-packaged food and ingredients, the use of traditional stocks and broths took a sharp nosedive. It’s light years easier to grab a can off the shelf in the grocery store than to simmer pounds and pounds of bones in the kitchen for hours on end. Convenience won out. But something was lost in that new found convenience. With the advent of primal, paleo, keto, and other nutritional philosophies which focus on a return to ways of eating that more closely resemble that of our ancestors, bone broth was rediscovered. Just like that thousands of people began to make stocks and broths like their grandma did, from scratch.
Benefits of “Bone Broth”
The whole reason everyone jumped on the bone broth bandwagon is for the supposed benefits. They weren’t wrong. Bone broth is incredibly nutritious and healing. Its benefits come from its rich profile of minerals, vitamins, collagen, amino acids, and gelatin. This mix of nutrients makes it fantastic for your skin, joints, immune system, gut, and metabolism. It also helps in dexotification by bolstering the production of glutathione from its high glycine content. It’s low in calories and has almost zero carbs so the amazing mix of nutrition and health benefits come with next to no impact on your waistline. Bone broth is often referred to as a superfood. That is a title it clearly deserves.
Bone Broth is NOT just for sipping!
Bone broth is so often thought of as a supplement or a magical sipping elixer that many people seem to have forgotten what a good stock is for in the first place: SOUP. Or other stuff too. The point being is that bone broth need not be constrained to a coffee mug. The recipe provided here is for a good base stock. You can certainly sip it by itself if that’s what you want to do. BUT, do not forget that what “bone broth” really is is a great base stock. You can use this to make many different types of soups and other dishes. If you have a specific soup it mind feel free to change some of the ingredients to fit whatever flavor profile you’re looking for. I’ll often put some of the stock in a pot with ginger, star anise, and cinnamon to make a soup reminiscent of Vietnamese Pho. This is a recipe for a good utilitarian stock, don’t be afraid to utilize it for what stock was always used for!
| Servings |
|
- 6 - 7 lbs bones marrow bones, joints and other cuts with lots of connective tissue
- 3 tbsp apple cider vinegar
- 2 carrots
- 2 onions
- 2 heads garlic
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 tbsp peppercorns
- 1 leek
Ingredients
|
|
- Roast the bones for 20 minutes at 350ºF. Roast the onion, carrots and the garlic for 45 minutes at 350ºF.
- Add all ingredients to a large stock pot and cover with water. Simmer on low for 12 to 48 hours. Cool and strain the broth. Refrigerate until the broth sets and remove the top layer of fat. Portion and use for soups and sipping.
  |
| Bragg Organic Raw Apple Cider Vinegar |
