How to Make Bone Broth

Learn how to make healthy, nourishing, gut-healing bone broth easily at home in an Instant Pot, slow cooker, or stockpot. This recipe for homemade beef or chicken bone broth can be enjoyed on its own or used to enhance your everyday cooking.

Soups and stews are always great meal options because they’re easy to put together, you can load them with vegetables, and they’re deliciously comforting. And by using bone broth—the liquid that results from simmering bones and vegetables with water—as the base of your favourite soup or stew, you can elevate the recipe both in flavour and nutritional value.

There really is no comparison between homemade bone broth and grocery store boxed broth, mostly because conventional broths have almost zero nutritional benefit. And to be honest, the ingredient list is a little scary.

With bone broth, not only will you take in valuable minerals and nutrients extracted from the bones, you’ll also get a nice dose of gelatin which helps to keep skin, hair, and nails healthy and youthful. Not gonna lie, I’m hoping that my daily broth intake will help prevent, or at least delay, those inevitable wrinkles!

The gelatin in bone broth is also known to be excellent for healing and nourishing the gut. This is amazing because gut health has been found to be extremely important for overall health.

You can tell your broth is full of gelatin when, once chilled, the broth becomes firm and gelatinous, similar to jello. But don’t worry: that jelly-like broth will melt away into a rich, delicious liquid when heated. I often rate the success of my bone broth on how firm the chilled broth is. You can pretty much guarantee some good gel action if you add lots of beef knuckle bones to your beef broth and chicken feet to your chicken broth.

Although bone broth has become more “trendy” over the last few years, it’s not something new. Back in the day, our great grandparents wouldn’t dare throw away the bones from dinner. Instead, they’d cook them down with vegetable scraps to create an amazing soup base with what many today would have tossed in the trash.

Next time you roast a chicken or turkey, strip the carcass of all the meat, add it to a pot with some water and veg, and let it transform into a beautiful bone broth. No waste and basically free, nourishing broth to make the most amazing chicken or turkey soup!

If you like to eat beef ribs, chicken legs, or bone-in chicken breast, you can also save those bones for broth. Store them in a bag in the freezer and when you have enough, make your delicious bone broth.

Because I make a lot of broth, the majority are made with bones I purchase from our local farmers’ market. I try to get the best bones available, and if possible, you should too. Look for bones from animals that were grass-fed or pasture-raised and not exposed to antibiotics or other chemicals. The way the animal was raised will affect the nutritional value of your broth, so you want to use quality ingredients.

In terms of veg, I like to use the same principle and use organic vegetables when possible. I use the typical trio of celery, carrots, and onion, and also toss in a ton of garlic, fresh turmeric for its anti-inflammatory properties, and a strip of seaweed which is a great source of iodine.

There are a few different methods that I’ve used to make bone broth: in a stockpot on the stove, in a slow cooker, and in the Instant Pot.

I started with the stove top, a method that takes about 24 hours to produce a rich bone broth. I wasn’t comfortable leaving our stove on during the night or when no one was home, so I quickly switched to the slow cooker. I made broth in a slow cooker almost every day for about a year. The slow cooker was a great option because there was a little less worry, and similar to the stove top method, the broth was ready in about 24 hours.

I’ve since switched to a pressure cooker to make bone broth using the amazing Instant Pot. The Instant Pot method only takes about 3 hours from start to finish, and it’s better for our lifestyle.

Bone broth is a huge staple in our diet and we try to have at least one cup per day (usually more!) in some form or another. Want to try incorporating more bone broth into your diet? Add it to your soups and stews, use it to sauté vegetables, cook grains in broth instead of water, or even just drink it from a mug.

Curt and I both enjoy sipping on a cup of warm broth and it’s usually one of the first things we consume each day. I like the idea of having bone broth on an empty stomach so it can provide nourishment to the body and digestive system without any interference from food.

Is bone broth a regular part of your diet? What’s your favourite way to enjoy it?

 

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