Homemade Bone Broth Recipe and Benefits of Bone Broth
In recent years, bone broth has gained popularity as a nutritional powerhouse offering nutrients to benefit overall health. However bone broth has been around for thousands of years and has been a staple in many traditional cuisines and cultures around the world. Bone broth is made by simmering bones to create a nutrient-rich broth for an extended cooking time (oftentimes 24 hours or more) to extract collagen and gelatin from the bones, which results in a thicker, more gelatinous consistency when cooled. Bone broth has many potential health-boosting properties that make it even more beneficial beyond it being a delicious addition to soups, stews and cooked grains.
Benefits of Bone Broth
One key benefit of bone broth is that the collagen and gelatin found in bone broth may support joint function and joint health. These components help maintain the integrity of connective tissues which is especially important as we age.
Bone broth contains an amino acid called glutamine, which has been associated with gut health and improving the intestinal barrier of the gut.
Bone broth is rich in minerals, making it an easy way to punch up the nutrient intake in your diet. Using bone broth to cook rice or quinoa, or as the base in soups, stews and sauces is an easy way to amp up the minerals in your diet.
This time of year I love to have bone broth on hand at all times as there’s some promising research showing that the amino acids, minerals and other compounds in bone broth contribute to a stronger immune system, especially with respiratory infections. Grandma was right all along with her chicken soup as medicine! And even if it’s only a placebo effect, sipping on a mug of hot bone broth is so comforting in the colder months to me, and enriching our rice or quinoa with additional minerals and amino acids certainly can’t hurt!
I find it super simple to make our own bone broth that I pack away in the freezer in old glass jars for when we need it. We get our meat locally, and can add on to our monthly orders a few pounds of chicken backs, necks or feet. These are the bones I use to make our broth, and while I don’t follow any recipe exactly, below is what I put in each batch.
Homemade Bone Broth Recipe
About 3 pounds of chicken back bones
2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
“Butts” of veggies - celery, carrots, and onion in particular. I have a bag in the freezer and whenever I cook these veggies, I put the scraps in the bag for future bone broth batches
A knob of ginger
A few cloves of garlic
2 Tbsp kosher salt
Enough water to cover the bones and veggies
Dried herbs I have on hand, such as bay leaves, dried rosemary, dried thyme
I put all of this in the bowl of my crockpot and cook on low for 24 hours. Once done, I strain all of the scraps and bones out (my dog loves this part, getting all of the scraps of chicken that fall off the bone!) and cool the broth in the fridge for a few hours. At that point, sometimes there is a thin layer of hardened fat that accumulates that I skim off before dividing the broth into several glass jars to be stored in the freezer.
Like I said, I love sipping on broth like tea, or use broth in place of water in a 1:1 ratio when cooking rice or quinoa, which adds great flavor.
Occasionally if I don’t have broth on hand, I pick up some at the grocery store. My favorite brands are Kettle and Fire or Trader Joes Organic Chicken Bone Broth - both use the same ingredients I use when I make it myself, and pack 10g of protein per cup, which is a good indication it is bone broth and not regular chicken broth.
