How to Make Your Own Meat Stock and Bone Broth

How to Make Your Own Meat Stock and Bone Broth

I got this idea from the excellent GAPS Diet book by Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride.

This is a cheap, really easy and extremely healthy way to cook meat and I wish I had discovered it years ago. I've used a chicken here but you can use many types of meat. When using other types of meat, buy large bones from the butcher (which should be very cheap).

Make Your Own Meat Stock and Bone Broth - Equipment This is the equipment needed. It's also a good idea to also have a strainer/sieve and some containers to store the liquid stock in the fridge.

You need a pretty large pot for this. You could also use a slow cooker, though the one I have isn't really large enough for a whole chicken.

How to Make Your Own Meat Stock and Bone Broth - Chicken This is the chicken I've been using. These are available in Australia in most ordinary supermarkets, and they are not expensive. Expect to pay around $10-12 for one of these. Its more healthy if you can use meat that hasn't been raised full of chemicals and drugs.

Bow Drill Fire Kit - Fireboard

Put the chicken in the pot and add water and salt. Then you are ready to cook it. Cooking doesn't get much easier than this.

How to Make Your Own Meat Stock and Bone Broth - Filling Fill it to about halfway between the top of the chicken and the top of the pot. It doesn't have to be exact. You could also add vegetables to make it into chicken soup rather than stock.

I found that when boiling, the chicken floats 1-2 cm out of the water, so after a few hours I turn it over just to make sure all of it gets boiled well. I don't know if you really need to do this.

Make Your Own Meat Stock and Bone Broth - PotPut it on the stove and turn on high till boiling, then turn down to a simmer (which means a very slow boil so that its only just bubbling). On my small low-power stove it takes 20 minutes on high (number 6 out of 6 on the dial) to boil, and then simmers well on the half power setting (3 out of 6).

 

Boil it up on the stove for several hours. I found that 8 hours is a good time for a chicken. The longer you boil it, the more nutrients transfer from the chicken to the water, and the softer the bones will get. Most of the websites I read say that to call it a "bone broth" it should be boiled for 24 hours.

How to Make Your Own Meat Stock and Bone Broth - MugWhen its done, take off the stove and strain some of it into another container (like a saucepan). The stock can be drunk like a cup of tea. It tastes kind of like a cup-a-soup but about 100,000 times more healthy.

The chicken itself will fall apart and can be eaten for a meal.

Meat Stock and Bone Broth - FridgeWhen it is cool enough transfer to glass jars and keep in the fridge. Then you can boil it up again in a saucepan and keep drinking it over a week. It keeps for up to a week like this in the fridge.

Under the plate is a bowl with the remains of the chicken that I didn't eat all at once. More on this below...

I'll Grind Your Bones to Make My Bread

You can eat much more of the chicken using this method than the usual ways of cooking chicken (like baking). The cartilage and small bones go so soft that they can all be eaten. Most of them are not even crunchy.

Apart from sometimes in tinned fish, and in other processed foods where the bones are so well ground that you don't notice that they are there, I had never eaten bones before this. I don't mean eating the meat off the bones, but eating the bones themselves.

Be very careful when eating animal bones.

Warning - Edible Weeds WARNING: Not long before I made this for the first time, I heard a story about a man who accidentally ate a small, sharp chicken bone (that was probably baked or fried and not boiled for hours). The bone pierced his intestines from the inside, and he caught some septic condition from that and died in hospital. Be really careful when chewing and/or eating any kinds of bones. So I am very careful now. Chew a lot and be absolutely sure that you don't swallow anything even remotely sharp.

Fee Fi Fo Fum

The first couple of times I ate this dish, for some reason I kept getting the phrase "I'll grind your bones to make my bread" in my head. Along with "Fee fi fo fum". I also got a lot of images of medieval witches boiling up huge cauldrons with ingredients like wing of bat and head of rat. This made me wonder how much of our lost connections to the natural and spiritual worlds are a result of our sterile modern diet.

Many people say that eating only muscle meats (like most people do in modern society) limits our nutrition, and ideally we should eat much more of the animal including the bones and many of the organs (not the contents of the intestines though). I've heard that some people in long-term survival situations have even died of starvation from eating only muscle meats and nothing else, when there was plenty to eat, and they would have lived if they had eaten more parts of the animals.

Meat Stock and Bone Broth - BonesThis is all that was left after eating about 1/3 of the chicken. The larger bones were the only thing not soft enough to eat.

Meat Stock and Bone Broth - SternumIt's hard to see on this photo but this is is one of the two sternum bones of the chicken, soft enough for the fork to go right through it as if it was part of the meat.

How to Make Your Own Meat Stock and Bone Broth - VertebraYou can eat the spinal column, here is one of the vertebrae. These go really soft, after 8 hours they aren't crunchy at all.

How to Make Your Own Meat Stock and Bone Broth - Bones This was the remains after another 1/3 of the chicken was consumed the following day.

How to Make Your Own Meat Stock and Bone Broth - Bone MarrowAfter a few meals of eating meat and bones, I discovered that the ends of the long bones are also quite soft and you can get to the marrow. The middle of the shafts was still too hard to eat. See the warning above about eating hard bones. If you boiled the chicken for longer than 8 hours, these would also become soft.

Make Your Own Meat Stock and Bone Broth - BonesThis is all that was left of the final 1/3 of the chicken.

The three photos here of plates with bones left on the plate, added together, represent everything that I didn't eat of the chicken in the photo at the top of the page.

Recommended Reading

The Heal Your Gut Cookbook: Nutrient-Dense Recipes for Intestinal Health Using the Gaps Diet, by Hillary Boynton, Mary Brackett - How to Make Your Own Meat Stock and Bone Broth The Heal Your Gut Cookbook: Nutrient-Dense Recipes for Intestinal Health Using the Gaps Diet, by Hillary Boynton, Mary Brackett.

The product information says "All disease begins in the gut, Hippocrates instructed more than two thousand years ago. Today, more people than ever are struggling with gut-related chronic disease. In this visually stunning cookbook, GAPS Diet experts Hilary Boynton and Mary G. Brackett offer more than 200 straightforward, nutrient-dense, and appealing recipes designed to heal your gut and thereby manage the illnesses that stem from it.

Developed by pioneering British MD Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS) refers to disorders, including ADD/ADHD, autism, addictions, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, stemming from or exacerbated by leaky gut and dysbiosis. Gut and Physiology Syndrome (also GAPS) likewise refers to chronic gut-related physical conditions, including celiac disease, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes type one, and Crohn s disease, as well as asthma, eczema, allergies, thyroid disorders, and more.

Dr. Campbell-McBride designed the GAPS Diet to restore the balance between beneficial and pathogenic intestinal bacteria and seal the gut through the elimination of grains, processed foods, and refined sugars and the carefully sequenced reintroduction of nutrient-dense foods, including bone broths, raw cultured dairy, certain fermented vegetables, organic pastured eggs, organ meats, and more.

From basic bone broth and broth-based soups, such as maitake mushroom immune boosting soup in the first stage of the GAPS Intro Diet to roasted pork sausage with red onion and butternut squash, marinated cod fish tacos with coconut flour tortillas, and for the adventurous chicken livers wrapped in bacon during the full GAPS Diet, readers will discover a great deal of flexibility within this restrictive diet for delicious home-cooked and even kid-friendly meals. Readers will find recipes for salads, fish, poultry, meat, organ meats, vegetables, ferments, snacks, and even desserts, as well as sauces, dressings, and marinades.

The Heal Your Gut Cookbook also walks readers through the key cooking techniques and ingredients that form the backbone of the GAPS Diet: working with stocks and broths, soaking nuts and seeds, using coconut, and culturing raw dairy. And, throughout, Boynton offers an encouraging perspective on the life-changing improvements to her family s health, as she, her husband, and their five children followed this challenging, but powerful, diet.

An evolution of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, GAPS will appeal to followers of the Paleo Diet, who are still struggling for optimum health. The Heal Your Gut Cookbook is a must-have if you are following the GAPS Diet, considering the GAPS Diet, or simply looking to improve your digestive health and by extension your physical and mental well-being."

Purchase from Australia (Booktopia)

Purchase from Amazon.com.au (Australian Site)

See Also

Overview of Firemaking
The Hand Drill Fire Kit
Bow Drill and Hand Drill Firemaking Woods
Survival and Wilderness Skills Books
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